I am afraid we are really talking past each other which well may be due to the fact that English is not my mother tongue.

In #7 I wrote:

I have misunderstood so far and maybe I still do, but for sure I know it is a lot more complicated than I first thought.

By that I meant that the formula in 3-attempt exam_3 was completely wrong (even if it might have returned "correct" results.

That was why I (in my post #8) uploaded a file (3-attempt exam_5) with a completely different approach with helper cells. At present this is what I think returns the correct result.

In your most recent post (#9) you seem to ignore my post #8.

Didn't you see that in #8 I also wrote:

I have no solution to the problem shown in file: 3-attempt exam_4.xlsx

that is the problem with deleting columns.

Can't you just make different templates with the necessary number of columns?