An English language test provider has been fined £875,000 for issuing incorrect results on nearly 100,000 occasions.
The penalty imposed on Cambridge English by regulator the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) follows issues with the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), used by universities in international admissions, between August 2023 and September 2025.
Errors were identified in automated computer-based marking of the listening and reading components of the test.
Of the 7.7 million tests taken during the period, 93,865 responses were found to have been incorrectly marked by the system.
Of these, in around a third of cases – 30,649 – it was deemed that test results were unaffected by the errors. But two-thirds of candidates – 62,794 – were issued results for at least one of the components that had to be corrected. A third of these – 21,717 – received a corrected overall qualification score.
