A decision on whether to re-assess the scores of students who completed Grade 12 before the 2005 academic year but are applying for university this year should be made as soon as Monday.

A small cluster of students looking to win university admission this year eagerly awaits the decision.

This year a new system of grading puts students' scores into one of eight categories, but before the new system was introduced there were only five categories.

The new grades are rated 0, 1, 1.5, 2 and so on to 4, previously the grades were simply sorted into categories 0 to 4.

The minority of students who have, for whatever reason, deferred their university applications now want their tests re-graded according to the new system, lest they be disadvantaged.

Although most students go to universities in the year following their graduation from secondary school, some wait a year, or even a few years, to improve their chances of getting into their first choice of university.

But this year that minority feels threatened, because the authorities have raised the weighting of their grades from their final years at school to 30 per cent of their overall result, from the previous 10 per cent.

Education Minister Chaturon Chaisang yesterday said relevant authorities were now considering whether it was possible to re-grade students' scores.

"There are legal aspects we need to consider, because re-grading will affect a lot of students," he said.

He called on schools to let the Education Ministry know whether they had students' raw scores on record anywhere.

"If they don't have records of raw scores, it will be impossible to do the re-grading," he said. However, Chaturon reckoned the students deserved re-grading, if it was possible.

As for the debacle of this year's O-Net and A-Net scores - in which some students recorded the unlikely score of zero because of a glitch in the system - Chaturon said a reassessment of the overall tallies was progressing well.

Earlier this month, the National Institute of Education Testing Service (NIETS) twice dismissed the O-Net and A-Net results because so many were so obviously wrong.

The O-Net (Ordination National Educational Test) and A-Net (Advanced National Educational Test) are critical for students, because their scores are used as the main factor in their chances of admission to a university.

The Office of Higher Education Commission (Ohec) has stepped in

to help with the new round of assessments.

Ohec secretary-general Pavich Thongroj yesterday said the new

scores would be compared with scores prepared by NIETS, to ensure they were accurate.

On the matter of unidentified examination papers, Pavich said officials had successfully established who had written the papers in many instances, but there were still a few that might pose problems.

"Soon there will be far fewer

problematic answer sheets left," said Pavich.

NIETS chairwoman Khunying Sumontha Promboon said the priority now was establishing students' correct scores.

Exactly how and why things went wrong in the first place would be investigated later, she said.