Usually, it's the student who fails an exam. In Italy, it's the exams which are getting failing grades for embarrassing errors that have already cost one education official her job.

Italy's new Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini vowed Friday that those responsible for the errors would be found and ,opportune sanctions" taken against them.

Several mistakes in the texts of exams that high school students must pass before graduation were found in ancient Greek, Italian literature and in English tests.

The most error-riddled test was the English exam, which was given to students Thursday in vocational high schools whose foreign language courses are meant to prepare pupils for jobs in tourism.

A text about a holiday villa in Namibia which students had to analyze was marred by wrong subject-verb agreements, awkward phrasing and misspellings like ,budges" instead of ,budgets."

,I believe a waiter in Venice would use more adequate and correct English," Sergio Perosa, an Italian expert on American and English literature, wrote in the Corriere della Sera newspaper Friday. He said the exam text came close to ,pidgin English."

Students and professors alike complained about a dropped word in an ancient Greek text given in high schools specializing in classical studies.

Earlier in the week, students emerging from an Italian literature exam found it amusing that a question about a poem by the Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale confused the inspiration for the work -- the exam assumed the muse was a woman instead of a male ballet dancer.

That error cost Education Ministry official Caterina Petruzzi her job supervising the preparation of exams for Italy's students.

Petruzzi insisted the test was correct, telling Sky TG24 TV that she received no complaints from teachers who had reviewed it before the students took the exam. She told Corriere della Sera that she would get a job teaching at some Italian private university.