But how about this:

Come on, ABRSM, surely this can't be the first time your system has had to deal with an acute accent?

Oh dear!

And no-one spotted that?

Really?
That's unbelievable!

Does the candidate have a surname?

It looks to be blanked out.
But has the surname got any accents (etc) in and were they dealt with appropriately?

Also, do you have to pay for a replacement? (I was looking at Trinity and it seems you have to pay for a spelling mistake!)

It's not only the AB.

My daughter has a French surname and took an exam in France organised by French people and for some bizarre reason, they decided to change the ending of her surname to make it feminine (ie the way you would with an adjective)

Yeah, I blanked out the rest for his privacy, but no, no other accents to worry about.

Trinity's replacement charge is for if there was an error in the entry information, not if they were at fault.

With Trinity, they do say you can correct name misspellings on the entry slip, and that you should point this out to the examiner. I bet they'd argue that if this wasn't done, then it's the fault of the candidate for not correcting it. Although if they get the entry slip right and the certificate wrong, then that's definitely their problem!!!

What a muddle - it's a bit like the AB can only do capital letters, so I get an MED after my name not an MEd

Do you put accents on capitals? I thought you didn't.

I thought that too!

Accents can certainly be associated with both upper and lower case letters in Greek...

In this case, with Spanish, there's never going to be an accent at the beginning of a word, so what you do when going all-caps is ambiuous. It's certainly not typographically impossible, though!

It looks to me like a software bug, in that the system is transposing names to all-caps only by altering the twenty-six English letters a-z. I'm just amazed that such a simple problem hasn't been found and corrected before now.

I had a problem with a Spanish surname which had been copied incorrectly by LCM.

I managed to get a space in mine so it says M ED, which is a bit more meaningful!

But I gave up trying to get a circumflex accent on one name.

I don't know about Spanish but in French most people don't put an accent on the first capital letter of a name (although some do), however if the whole word is in capitals then they would usually put all the accents in.

On Word you can find capital letters with accents in the "insert special character" box (I can't remember exactly what it is called in English) or (if you know them) you can use keyboard short cuts. I know they are there even on the English version of Word as I have used them on my parents' computer in the UK.

Also in Welsh

If it's any consolation, I've just renewed my passport and I was expecting trouble as on my now-expired passport my middle name was mis-spelt . I didn't notice for SEVEN years until I had to complete a visa application for India and it said to insert name as it appears on your passport. At which point, I was rathe rsurprised to find an "i" where there ought not to be one!

It just shows that you see what you expect to see...

New one is correct

...and the capitals-only approach extends to their own first diploma, the DIPABRSM

I'm trying to remember, did they capitalise names on the old-style certificates, before they changed them about four years ago? Could somebody with one handy check?

I can imagine somebody deciding that all-caps looked better, and it being implemented as a hack on the original system. Reliably converting to upper case has numerous quirks, as this blog post demonstrates: http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/in...-is-tricky.html

If it helps, my 2007 Grade 5 Theory has my name and centre in CAPITALS. (As does the 2006 practical). Everything else is in Big and little Letters.

My Grade 1 Clarinet certificate from 1996 has my name and my teacher's name in capital letters.

My certificates from 1980whatever have my name typed in typewriter!

Well at least I got a helpful reply - post it back and they'll send a correction. Fingers crossed they correct the system in time for my Turkish candidate next session...