"They have written a letter saying we will not return them, they have been lost."

Her mother, Evon, said: "We have been told by Edexcel that it won't affect their overall marks but we find that hard to accept.

"A lot of work for this year, the back-up work, was in those portfolios that were lost."

Laura said: "It's just really annoying and it's heartbreaking to know that you have worked that hard on something and they just sweep it under the carpet and they don't seem to care much about it.

"Everyone is completely gutted."

Geography and physics

A question in last Friday's Changing Natural Environments paper asked students to look at a map and say why something was happening at B when it should have been A.

Edexcel said it had sent out an erratum slip correcting this before the exam.

Another geography paper, Managing Change in Human Environments, due to have been sat on Tuesday 22 January, is said to have been changed.

It appears that a number of the papers first sent out to schools had pages missing.

In a physics paper taken on 14 January, a question about ice-skaters referred to "an interval of 0.6 seconds" - with a diagram showing the interval as 0.5 seconds.

As one teacher put it: "Almost all of my 60 candidates noticed this - but which number would give the right answers?"

Hit twice

A student at Hutchesons' Grammar School in Glasgow, Gavin Jackson, has been affected twice - by the physics and maths blunders.

He is also doing further maths.

"Since I'm doing them all in one year - because I did Scottish Highers last year - these set of exams are especially important to me because I need three As to get into the university of my choice," he told BBC News Online.

"I realise that English people do their A-levels over two years so I think they get more chances to sit their modules than we Scots do.

"This is why I'm particularly angry about these errors because this is my only chance."

He said the mistakes had affected him greatly.

"I spent a while on those erroneous questions making sure I had done everything correctly, eventually realising that it was Edexcel's errors, not mine.

"I also wasted time by being the first to ask the invigilator about the mistakes (in both exams), which she knew nothing about."

Bad year

Edexcel is the second largest of the three big examination boards in the country and serves about 6,000 schools and colleges.

It has been unusually unfortunate recently.

Last March, thousands of sixth formers were given the wrong results for an information technology key skills exam.

In June it emerged that an Edexcel A-level maths paper had been leaked in advance and was allegedly being offered for sale to students in London.

In August, some pupils had their results for a maths GCSE late.

In October, Edexcel's chief executive resigned suddenly.

BBC News

-- Anonymous, January 22, 2002