An inquiry into the IT meltdown that forced the Royal Australasian College of Physicians to abandon its high-stakes registrar exam halfway through has laid bare in humiliating detail a string of management and system failures.

Some 1200 trainees were forced to re-sit the five-hour divisional written exam in February last year when an “unknown technical fault” hit the college’s first-ever attempt at computer based testing.

Now the findings of the investigation into the fiasco — which left dozens of registrars in tears and their futures in the balance — has finally been handed to college members.

It paints a damning picture of the college management at the time, which did not ensure that the system was fully tested before it was used and appears to have been in denial about the possibility of a full-scale failure.