An angry parent joins a protest at the National Institute of Education Testing Service yesterday.

In the face of growing pressure from students and parents, the Higher Education Commission yesterday agreed to review all 4.6 million answer sheets for the O-Net and A-Net examinations.

The decision came after urgent meetings between the chiefs of the commission and the National Institute of Education Testing Service and Education Minister Chaturon Chaisang.

Earlier, the testing service had failed to end apparent mistakes plaguing the score announcements. For example, many who took the tests received the virtually impossible "zero" mark, while some who sat  the tests were labelled "no shows".

The O-Net (Ordinary National Educational Test) and A-Net (Advanced National Educational Test), held by testing service, are vital to 12th graders planning to further their education.

This year marks the first time the O-Net and A-Net scores are used as university-admission criteria. About 300,000 students sat the tests.

The testing service first an-nounced the O-Net and A-Net scores in the form of the T-score on April 1 but voided them the following day after a flood of complaints from students. It promised to post the accurate scores online on Tuesday.

Still, when Tuesday's  announcement in the form of raw scores showed up, some errors were still detected. Furthermore, many students became increasingly worried because their raw scores did not seem to correspond to their T-scores. The testing service has admitted that it was unable to match about 1,500 answer sheets to test takers.

The problems prompted Chaturon to apologise yesterday.

At the same time, hundreds of students and parents crowded the offices of the testing service and the Higher Education Commission demanding accurate scores for the O-Net and A-Net.

"Could you please give me some peace of mind? Please give us some assurances before overwhelming stress pushes us to suicide," a female student told commission secretary-general Pavich Thongroj.

Pavich convened an urgent meeting with testing service director Prateep Chankong yesterday. Following their meeting, Pavich initially announced that the commission would postpone the deadline for students to submit their applications to universities via the central admission system.

His announcement, however, failed to appease the disgruntled students and parents. They demanded that all answer sheets be reviewed.

Pavich later decided to consult Chaturon on the demand. Chaturon gave his permission to review all answer sheets after a meeting with Prateep.

"[The commission] will trust officials with decades of experiences in holding central university-entrance exams to review the answer sheets," Pavich said, adding that both officials and computers would help in the process.

He said he could not estimate the time for the review process.

However, he expressed hope that the university-admission process would be completed by May 31 so that the new semester could start without any delay.

Pavich said the commission would invite the University Presidents Council of Thailand to a meeting tomorrow. Initially, the deadline for students to submit applications to universities via the central admission system was set on April 11.

A student, who identified himself only as Wisarut said he was quite satisfied with the commission's decision. However, he called on all relevant officials to accurately conduct the scoring process to prevent any further problem.

"If possible, I hope the scores can be posted on paper around testing centres, too, so that students without Internet access will not suffer," he said.

This year was also the first time that the scores used as university-admission criteria were announced on websites only.

Meanwhile, an Abac poll found that most senior secondary students in Bangkok still lacked full understanding of the new university-admission system. The survey was conducted on Tuesday.

Of 1,403 respondents, about 80 per cent had no idea what T-scores are. About 75 per cent said they did not clearly understand the admission system. About two-thirds did not understand how GPA and GPAX are used in university-admission criteria. About two-thirds did not understand A-Net, while about 60 per cent did not understand O-Net.

Many were shocked to find out that overall scores were much lower than T-scores.

"My son's T-score in A-Net science is 60 but the raw score is just 38.3," one parent complained.

A student from a prestigious school in Saraburi travelled to Bangkok yesterday to lodge a complaint with the testing service, saying he could not understand why his raw scores were lower than a friend's despite the fact his T-scores were higher.