back to article Test crash dummies: Pearson VUE broke half-way into all-day exam

Imagine you'd just spent 18 months of your life working towards a big certification exam that could make or break your career and, come the big day, the web-hosted test fell over. Well, for some newbie docs, that nightmare scenario today became all too real: blundering online exam provider Pearson VUE went TITSUP* during a day …

  1. Mayday
    Flame

    This is rather poor

    I've had Pearson Pue (pronounced "poo") exams shit themselves halfway through a test more than once. Once I had to start from scratch and another it restarted about 1/3 the way through. These poor guys were working hard for such a long time and would work to have "peaked" on exam day.

    It's annoying enough when you are doing a $3-500ish IT cert exam and you expect it to work, but doing some medicine degree where the costs and stakes are higher (in my view - particularly as a medical degree is a one off and high cost and I need to update my certs constantly so an exam is really just another exam) is not good enough.

  2. Snow Wombat
    Facepalm

    Holy Hell...

    Why would you outsource something THAT important, to THAT pack of clowns?

    I am in the process of re certifying a bunch of IT stuff, and my experience is that about 25% of the time I rock up and their systems are down or having issues and I have to re schedule my exam or sit around waiting to see if they can un F**k things so I can do said exam.

    Complete clown show.

    (El reg, we need to update the icons. We need a "bozo the clown" on for stories like this

    1. Erik4872

      Re: Holy Hell...

      They and Promettic are basically the only game in town if you want an independently-adminstered computerized exam. I think almost all if not all of the high-stakes exams are done on computer now in the US. The SAT, GRE, GMAT and MCAT definitely are...but I think the LSAT is still a paper and pencil exam. (Most lilely, because they don't trust those clowns either.)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Holy Hell...

        I dont see why exams suddenly have to be web hosted by a monopoly company. They arnt writing or marking the exams , just hosting the questions - they should charge normal data hosting rates, but I expect they charge 1000x that for this "service"

        This whole story could be the fault of that colleges ISP for all we know.

        why cant there be some local web hosted generic question asking , mulit choice marking app ?

  3. Erik4872

    That's awful

    This sounds like the equivalent of the US Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) taken at the end of medical school. Talk about a high-stakes exam...doctor friends of mine have said the score you get on it (assuming you pass) basically determines whether you get a residency you want, and that all future hiring is done based on that score too. I would have been beyond upset if I had spent months studying for the exam and not been able to complete it.

    It's one thing having an IT certification exam blow up in the middle...quite another for a test that determines the course of the rest of your life. Medicine and law seem to love these no-do-overs, all-or-nothing high stakes exams...maybe they're just rites of passage. I hope these exam candidates get something more than an, "oops, so sorry about that!" from Pearson VUE.

    1. Flakk
      Mushroom

      Really?

      It's one thing having an IT certification exam blow up in the middle...quite another for a test that determines the course of the rest of your life.

      Sure, because we poor plebeian IT lot have never had certifications open up previously unobtainable opportunities. How about a little less elitism, unless your hallowed physicians are going to fix their own systems the next time they go TITSUP*?

      Seven minutes into a five hour cybersecurity exam, the building housing a Pearson exam center lost power... which meant that all of the exam computers lost power. My example is hardly a nightmare scenario as portrayed in the article and in comments. I couldn't help but wonder if a few dozen inexpensive UPS devices could have at least allowed the proctor to gracefully pause all of the exams, preventing examinees from losing work and time.

      *Total Inability To Schedule Unpleasant Patient

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "It's one thing having an IT certification exam blow up in the middle...quite another for a test that determines the course of the rest of your life. "

    It was the last straw for me in my then current position when the bloody thing blew up on me during an IT certification exam, so I can indeed argue that it determined the course of the rest of my life.

    1. Erik4872

      Maybe, but..

      But you can take a certification exam again... Some of these tests are structured such that you can't invalidate a bad score. The MCAT (the exam you take to gain access to the academic hazing that is medical school) is like this..all your scores, good or bad, stay on your record and follow you, so even taking it again carries less weight.

      Imagine being 22, most likely under a lot of parental and societal pressure to get into med school, and basically flushing your life down the toilet if you have a bad day on test day. Not good, especially if you've spent the last year or more studying, which is apparently recommended.

  5. Banksy
    Coat

    Acronym

    If only they were called the College of Royal Australasian Physicians instead.

    1. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
      Trollface

      Re: Acronym

      I saw that too

  6. Duffaboy

    This happened to me on a win 7 exam

    Had a BSOD on the pc right at the start of the exam. Tried to attract the centres attention by waving at cctv as I was told not to leave room till exam was finished. No one came to my rescue so I walked out to find them , the centre had to contact Microsoft to get a restart by that time I was a nervous wreak, luckily I managed to scrape a pass I won't be using that centre again as their kit was quite old

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We’ve installed a system for Pearson Vue at their contact centre. Absolute nightmare to work with, for months they were told firewall access were an issue and refused to look into it. They eventually resolved the issue themselves and never told us the RCA..

  8. 0laf
    FAIL

    Pish

    Yep. Sat a Pearson Vue managed professional certification exam. the system was absolute crap when it worked. Luckily the exam didn't have a fixed start time. It took an hour to get going.

  9. Bill Michaelson

    Pearson, huh?

    How about telling thousands of schools in the State of New Jersey, with hundreds of thousands of students being tested - oops - never mind, we'll have to just do this another day...

    http://bill.from.net/autonomy

  10. Nimby
    Angel

    Glass half full...

    On the brighter side, now they have extra time to study!

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon