Academics have been commissioned to design replacement exam-scoring software, which will release scores for 400,000 potential university students.

The scores from the new software, designed by the Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Engineering, are due to be announced on April 30.

The results will probably differ from the previous results, said Pavich Thongroj, secretary general of the Office of Higher Education Commission (OHEC), yesterday.

Demand for new software has been fuelled by the failure of the existing scoring system used by the National Institute of Education Testing Service (NIETS), which earlier this month, twice overruled its O-Net (Ordinary National Educational Test) and A-Net (Advanced National Educational Test) scores.

Following protest by students and parents, the Education Ministry ordered that all answer sheets be checked and scored again. OHEC has taken over the task from NIETS in a bid to restore student trust.

This is the first year the two sets of exams will be used as university admission criteria.

Pavich said the scoring software used by NIETS suffered from acute problems, especially when dealing with English and Thai papers.

He said the new software would be more flexible, reading answers made by a tick instead of just an X.

But NIETS director Prateep Chankong defended the institute's scoring software, developed by Khon Kaen University.

"This software has been used by many agencies," he said.

Prateep believes the problems stem from some students ticking two choices on one question, causing the software to give no score although one of the choices might have been correct.

Dr Sompong Wittayasakphan, head of the Thai-Language Department at Chiang Mai University, said the low scores often reflected the inadequacies of students rather than the software alone.

"From the papers I have seen, only a handful of students can give a clear answer when asked about a poem," the lecturer said.

He added that many students apparently did not understand the instructions and gave irrelevant answers, while many failed to spell a keyword correctly making it impossible to give marks.

"Many students write nothing on their answer sheets," Sompong said.

However, he said the authorities needed to examine whether open-ended questions should be in next year's exams.

Sompong said a lecturer was given 75 satang for each item they scored.