Education Minister Fabio Mussi moved on Wednesday to stem polemics over admissions exams for medical students after questions were raised about transparency at some universities.
Mussi formally requested that the recent test held at Catanzaro university in the southern Calabria region be repeated. Three pages of questions disappeared from university offices just before the test was held.
The dean of the university immediately announced that the test - needed to select students for oversubscribed medicine courses - would be repeated.
Mussi asked that the names of about 50 students involved in an investigation by prosecutors at Bari University be scratched from the results.
It emerged on Tuesday that a gynaecology lecturer and six others were under investigation for allegedly setting up a system to send certain students SMS messages containing answers to questions while they were doing the test.
The minister also asked Messina University in Sicily to check the "regularity" of its test results after it emerged its students consistently outperformed colleagues elsewhere in the country.
"We must strengthen guarantees of secrecy for these tests," Mussi said, adding that he was preparing a new system to do this.
He also said he would ask national university authorities to fire any university staff found by current enquiries to be corrupt.
The quizzes used in Italian universities to select medical students are controversial, not only because of corruption allegations but also because of problems with two of the 80 questions used last time round.
One question had more than one correct answer and the other had no correct response. Two other questions were also contested because one mentioned a non-existent work of literature and another contained a potentially important misprint.
Answering demands that this year's test be scrubbed all across the nation, Mussi said it was impractical and that two imperfect questions were not enough to render the test invalid.
But there are many critics, especially in the medical profession, who believe the tests are useless anyway.
"This whole selection procedure must be ditched," said one national doctor's association. "It certainly doesn't reward the best students but just the lucky ones who manage on the day to guess the right answers".
The 80 questions use the multiple choice method and aim to test general, rather than medical, knowledge.
