MISSING pieces of artwork, overly severe marking and parcels falling off the back of a lorry it all adds up to the worst period ever experienced in the 70 year history of the Leaving Certificate.

With more than 130,000 students due to begin this year's certificate exams in just a fortnight, confidence in the security of the exam process has never been lower.

And, in spite of the constant questioning of procedures, it still isn't clear, in the worst incidents, what went wrong, and why.

Even the relatively benign explanation provided for the latest farce when a parcel of engineering practical work fell off a lorry on a bog road in Co Roscommon earlier this month could not spare the blushes of the Minister for Education, who has borne the brunt of heavy criticism for the repeated mistakes involving the exam system.

Once again, Niamh Bhreathnach was forced to report the loss of exam work, and the fact that the Department was not in full possession of the facts. Once again, the mistake was picked up by an outside agency rather than internal checking.

This time, the Department of Education maintained that newly introduced procedures would have revealed that the practical work of some students was missing. However, this fact would only emerge at the time of marking, or long after there would be any chance of finding any work that had gone missing.

The eventual explanation, which showed that the parcel never got to the Department's exam centre in Athlone, absolves the Minister of much of the blame. But it comes as little comfort to students, who care only that the products of their sweat and toil arrive safely by whatever means at the intended destination.

It doesn't matter that the latest blunder involved the work of only eight students. Even the smallest errors raises the fear among thousands of students, parents and teachers, that other, larger mistakes may be going undetected. The blunders surrounding last year's art exam have spawned multiple allegations of other mistakes, as the Department has found to its cost.

The Price Waterhouse report into the mistakes made in marking last year's Leaving Cert art exam has yet to be published. The Minister told the Dail in February it would be published within weeks subsequently, the date of publication was put back to April.

NOW Breathnach is saying it will be released "in the near future". This raises the possibility of it being published either immediately before the exams or during them. But the publication of the report at this time, and the attendant publicity it will inevitably garner, is bound to destabilise the atmosphere for this year's exam students.

The National Parents' Council, post primary says it is disappointed the report was not published sooner. "During the exams is not the right time to do it. The report could create a panic just when students need a period of calm," says the NPC spokesman, Nick Killian.

The bare facts of the art exam debacle are by now well known. In all, 51 students from 29 different schools were not credited for all their work in last year's art exam. Of these, 49 were not credited with a craft work component, and one was not credited with a design component.

Some 49 students received up grades when the errors were discovered, but for eight students who had already missed out on a third level place last autumn because of the mistakes, it was too late.

One other student was upgraded due to the incorrect processing of an appeal. Up to now, only four of the missing pieces of craft work have been found.

In January, the Minister appointed Price Waterhouse to investigate the errors made in the marking of last year's exams. The publication of this report is being held up by legal concerns over its contents.

Legal advice provided to the consultants has emphasised the need for them to be seen to have adopted fair procedures in carrying out their investigations and in completing their report. The Minister for Education told the Dail two weeks ago he has yet to receive the final report.

The saga of the missing artwork took a further twist last month when the Fianna Fail spokesman, Micheal Martin, claimed the work done by the 14 students in the worst affected school, the Ursuline school in Sligo, had turned up in a local factory.

Martin's bizarre claim, it turned out, was half right the material was signed for at the factory, but never actually received. It remains missing to this day.

To lose one parcel might be forgivable, but to lose 29 different packages sent at different times from school in different parts of the country is inexcusable and incredible. The Price Waterhouse inquiry if it is to be a meaningful Investigation of the affair all have to solve this mystery.

"The Minister will have to reassure parents on the delivery of scripts and practical work. It might be better to use a security firm to collect students' work from schools, rather than entrusting their delivery to An Post or Iarnrod Eireann," Killian suggests.

"OK, it might be more costly, but it's better than finding exam work in a bog in Roscommon," he points out.

But there are many other questions which remain unanswered. Why did the Department's internal checks not discover that the craft work of 50 students was missing? Why did the Department take so long to investigate the queries from the affected schools?

Why, when it did do so, did it take so long for the matter to come to light? Why was the Minister not informed for three weeks'? And who will bear responsibility for the mistakes that were undoubtedly made?

The fact that a number of further errors were uncovered during the early stages of the inquiry further undermined general confidence in the Department's procedures. Why did it take so long to discover these errors?

But Micheal Martin, who has worked hard to uncover the facts in the Dail, says there are other issues involved. The recheck system has clearly failed, he believes, and an independent appeals procedure is now needed. "There's also clearly a problem with the lines of communication in the Department. Systems should be put in place to give anything to do with the exams top priority," he says.

Even these questions will be as nothing once the report is released. If the finger of blame is pointed, what will the consequences be? How can the eight students who missed out on their entitlement to a college place be properly compensated for the loss of a year?

Many of general recommendations that will appear in the Price Waterhouse report have already been implemented by the Minister. The craft work component of the art exam is to be examined in schools by external examiners, rather than being sent to the Department in Athlone.

The computer systems of the exam branch have been improved to make it easier to spot whether a particular component is absent from the overall mark given to a student. And schools will henceforth be notified in cases where a student's result is not based on all the required components of the subject.

But what are schools and students to do when they are dissatisfied with their results, or the outcome of a recheck? In the art exam fiasco, it was only the doggedness of a parent of a student at the Ursuline school, who wrote twice to the Minister to press her daughter's case for a better grade, which uncovered the mistakes in marking.

It will be interesting to see whether the report meets the demands made by many parents for an independent appeals system. This many be the only way now to convince students and teachers that the exam system not only is fair, but operates fairly.