NIETS chairwoman Sumontha Phromboon said she had already assigned the Higher Education Commission to form a task force to develop a computer program to check the open-ended sections for science, mathematics and social science.

For the English and Thai language sections, an independent committee of 20 university lecturers will be set up to evaluate each subject.

Sumontha earlier met with Prateep Chankhong, the director of NIETS, which had proposed to review open-ended sections for only those students who had scored zero.

The decision to cover all students will hopefully restore the confidence of students and parents in both the NIETS and the new national university entrance system, she said.

This is the first year that O-Net and A-Net results are being used as admission criteria.

The old system was plagued by the same grading errors but no one had made an issue of it, Sumontha said.

She added that this year's English test papers were not marked by university students, as had been rumoured.

"If it's true someone must take responsibility. However, right now the urgent thing we have to do is get the scores right, not to look for a culprit," she said.

Sumontha insisted that the revised exam results could be announced on April 30 so students could turn in their applications by May 7.

Prateep said the review of the open-ended sections was started yesterday by scanning all answer sheets together with the 13-digit ID numbers of the students into the computer.

Responding to an Abac Poll survey that found that more than 80 per cent of high-school students were still confused by the new admission system and demanded improvements, Pavich Thongrog, secretary-general of the Higher Education Commission, said the problem was not caused by the admission system but by the scoring system.

Instead of conducting a poll to complain about the system, Assumption University should help in educating the public about the admission system, he said.