Marking company behind SATs fiasco was linked to a series of U.S. scandals

Thousands of immigrants who could not speak English were given passes in citizenship exams by ETS - even though the first basic requirement was that they could understand the language.

The scandal involved hundreds of testing centres across the U.S. in the 1990s. ETS abruptly closed 23 in New York, saying the move would improve services.

Crisis: Unmarked papers left outside The Hilton Hotel at Manchester Airport

The scandal was exposed only when the New York Times conducted an investigation in 1997.

It found that the New Jersey company had been dogged by security breaches, widespread cheating in exams, erratic markings and computer crashes.

Most shocking of all was apparent bribe-taking by citizenship testers. In Arizona, South American immigrants were said to have paid hundreds of dollars to ETS employees for a pass.

Immigration officials in Philadelphia reported that 90 per cent of those who had supposedly passed citizenship tests could not speak English.

The newspaper also discovered that trainee teachers in Louisiana had been buying answers to qualification exams.

'ETS have had problems for years,' said Robert Schaeffer, who is the director of Fairtest, a group that believes exams should be only part of student assessments. 'The UK fiasco is not surprising.'

Mr Schaeffer was an expert witness in a lawsuit involving hundreds of would-be teachers who were wrongly told by ETS they had failed exams. Many lost their livelihoods as a result.

'Halfway through the case ETS decided they would settle for $11.1 million,' said Mr Schaeffer.

He added: 'They do not do the things they claim they will in a timely fashion. Results are either very late or just wrong.'

ETS has an address in Princeton but its real base is a former equestrian centre nearby, where its £500,000-a-year president Kurt Landgraf lives.