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Pearson Vue Now On Day 5 of Massive Outage
Reader Patrick In Chicago is one of a few readers to write with this unpleasant news: "Computer-based testing provider Pearson Vue is now in day 5 of a global outage, preventing test-takers worldwide from sitting for exams. I was personally turned away from a Cisco exam on Wednesday morning because Pearson was unable to deliver. Countless people have posted to Pearson Vue's Facebook page detailing various states of panic. There are people who have certifications expiring. Others are unable to sit their medical board exams. Still others are unable to sit exams that they are required to pass in order to work — Pearson Vue's incompetence has actually prevented people from going out and making a paycheck." This reminds me of a friend of mine who had to wait half a year to re-take his bar exam, because of a software glitch on the part of ExamSoft's software.
quality software strikes again!
How, exactly?
Bar exam versus IT cert? Something required to practice law versus a shitty certification?
Software glitch versus global outage?
Wow. Just, wow.
Yeah, it reminds me of this one time my hard drive crashed at work, and I was down for 2 hours while IT installed a new one with a fresh image.
Pearson Vue also administer the theory component of the UK driving test.
It's not mentioned in TFA, does anybody know if there were affected also?
When my local bricks and mortar store screws up like this, they usually give away freebies. What, Pearson has no competition, you say? Well byte me.
A provider of network certification exams experiencing a service outage.
Though, I have to ask, what exactly is the issue here? When I took a Cisco exam, everything seemed local, can't they simply say "thanks for taking the exam, we'll email/mail/call you with the results when they become available"?
The privatization of education and testing once again shows inferior results compared to public education and testing. I have never heard of the MCAT, LCAT, GRE, or SAT ever having these kinds of problems.
... and therein lies the issue with essential certification being tied in to a proprietary, privately owned-and-managed system.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Think of all the frustration and loss of value that their selfish DRM systems have caused as they attempt to extract rent from people's needed education.
If free and open source software was used for distributed testing, this could all be avoided.
But I see no massive outrage there.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Sorry to break the news, but MCAT, GRE and SAT are run by private firms. They're 'non profits' but they are not government entities.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The privatization of education and testing once again shows inferior results compared to public education and testing. I have never heard of the MCAT, LCAT, GRE, or SAT ever having these kinds of problems.
Those tests are all administered by private companies.
And why are Object Oriented languages and Windows a good pair :-), For every developer who supports Objected Oriented language, this outage is for you, OO Languages!
Uh... Prometric, LSAC, and ETS are all private corporations, albeit nonprofit.
What, like having to reboot a #2 pencil?
This is what happens when there is no competition in this industry, reliance on a single provider can cripple you if there is no alternative. It boggles my mind that we trust private for-profit corporations to design and administer tests.
Since there isn't much hope of a government testing center solution, perhaps an alliance of professionals should agree on a set of standards. Those standards would be open and would allow institutions to bid the work out to multiple contractors. When you have one contractor, such as pearson, without any competition, you know they won the monolopy game.
ETS, which manages the GRE appears to be a private organization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_Testing_Service
If the definition of public is government operated, the College Board probably doesn't qualify. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board
But if your job is dependent on you having a certification, would you really leave it to the last 3 days of your certs validity to do the test? What if you fail, most certs have a minimum retry period of a week or so, don't they? Isn't this just a semi-inconvenient thing rather than the economy crushing madness the summary makes it out to be?
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
for a few weeks about ten years ago. I'm about 90% sure it was for Pearson. Some of the answers in the key weren't even right. When I tried to politely point this out I was punished for insubordination.
Article says the people were waiting for four hours not days? Which is it? An outage on a single server that lasts for five days means they arn't virtualizing and they arn't doing backups and they don't have spare equipment, complete incompetence! Guess all that admin training is doing absolutely no good. They would have been smart to pass on the blame or been a little more vague! I think they would learn a bit from my Training Videos http://rawcell.com.
It's called a sharpener.
Learn to love Alaska
Their logo appears to be the same font as my woefully overpriced Pearson textbooks. That does not amuse me.
I took the second part of the CompTIA A+ exam on Friday through Pearson. I had no idea I was barely dodging the nonfunctional bullet.
You can think the suits who don’t really understand technology and why we need redundant systems and links.
if this is a cloud based service would this not be normal to have a long outage every so often...?
I mean it's long been expired but I still don't want any shit.
I worked for Pearson several years ago. I had a small start-up company that specialized in courseware systems. The deal with Pearson was small, only around 500k to build a custom courseware system. Our team worked our hearts out desperately trying to get this product to market. We only took a small payment up-front and the rest was due on completion.
When the product was finished Pearson threw their team of lawyers at us when we tried to get the rest of what was due. They completely fucked us over, so badly that the company disbanded and all of us had to find new jobs without pay. I would bet that this is a similar situation.
Am I the only one who sees the delicious irony of doctors having to wait on something outside of their control? You know... like patients having to wait on doctors for hours at times ? ?
"prevented people from going out and making a paycheck"
That's what happens when you rely on "certification" for vendor products and proprietary standards. There's something wrong when one's job needs more certification to get promoted.
Wait, There is no testing? Theirs always more testing to do and I was promised cake.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
Of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_PLC
New Economic Perspectives
When doing maintenance in the data-center it is best practice to do one the following :
A: Run through the halls screaming downtime
B: Notify relevant parties of downtime and schedule appropriately
C: Give up, it runs a windows NT box that has never seen an update from Microsoft and its run by a really old guy that often falls asleep in the data-center but management doesn't care because when he croaks he's taking the whole company with him because no one know's how the hell that thing works.
D: None of the above, we're going for 100% up-time this year, suck-it Google!
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/25/yet-a-new-pearson-problem-with-testing/
Today, due to a problem with Pearson’s central server in Iowa, the test centers could not operate and we were not allowed into the test center for 5 hours after the scheduled time.
Based on this article it appears the service has not been down entirely for 5 days.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
In my particular line of work a 4-5+ hour outage would make most national media news. Careful planning goes not into daily run but also what to do in the event of a major outage and backup plans including dr failover. If Pearson is this important and has far reaching and potential legal obligations to provide testing services, I would expect them to have plans to recover from anything short of a well distributed and targeted nuclear attack. That is the mindset of mission critical enterprise IT. I can't pass judgement of Pearson's infrastructure because I don't work there and we certainly don't have all the facts but this likely will be a huge wake up call to their Management. It should also be a huge opportunity for an outside IT contracting company to do an audit of their plans.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Any education system that has only a single exam provider, flunks a basic test of intelligence.
Last semester I had a class that required testing on Pearson, and even on a typical day (not beginning of semester when everyone is creating accounts, and not during finals), their servers bogged down and responded slowly. Sometimes I would have to refresh a few times to get the page to load. This seems on par for the experience I have had with them.
So, there are all sorts of -local- power sources available for implementation:
1. huge diesel-fueled generators (call out your National Guard groups...
oh, wait, aren't they wasting their time deployed overseas...)
2. use nearby batteries of wind generators (or is it only the clever Danes,
who've planned such energy sources into their grid?)
3. use your area's nearby, -spare- Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR)
(no, wait, didn't your gov't - in Nixon's time - -kill- research on safe LFTRs?)
4. use lots of BetterPlace's EV battery-swap stations' spare electricity
(Oops! They've cut & run from the US's EV marketplace, maybe
because Americans are buying local more... & no such stations exist?)
Well, it looks like you're being adversely impacted by sequences of Bad Decision,
not to mention your own, eg, not insisting on 100% power back-up's for all hosting
services, which your systems depend on - whether in-house or out-sourced...
Bad Decisions hurt your Customers, but - no matter who made those decisions -
I hope you'll squeak-by to get a chance to re-think & improve on them in future...
I used to work with a few companies that work with Pearson, so we often had to integrate with their systems, consume their data, talk to their people, etc.
I laugh at this article because it is hardly surprising. A huge chunk of their services are built on some of the worst Indian programmer spaghetti crap in Java you have ever seen. At one point, one of the major testing companies I was working with had to build web services to exchange some data with them. They couldn't figure out simple things like using SSL, encoding in UTF-8, and not making things completely proprietary for no reason. They used to put up huge SOAP feeds where you'd get almost a meg of data and really the only useful value anyone would need would be 1 true/false. I've seen worse, but just barely.
Even more scary is how they treat personally identifiable information (PII). Avoiding correlating PII with results and tests is huge in that industry, and they have no clue. I've never seen a company staffed with so many inept people. They are only out for your cash and don't care about anything else. That's why so many of their tests and labs also look straight out of 1994 still.
This company is a joke. As a customer, I also was billed before several times when canceling the exam. Their cancelation system went down in part, but it was still registered as cancelled, but sent out no email. They claimed since I didn't have the email, no money back. So I asked that because their system broke, I have to pay? Yes. Unbelievable. Prometric isn't much better so they can get away with this kind of shady stuff.
I for one hope they burn, or at least draw attention from consumer rights organizations.
The problem is that these companies are usually business-to-business, that is, they sell their software to middle managers in a large company who will never actually use it themselves, so bugs, problems or errors go unreported.
I took an online test when hiring for my current company, provided by a 3rd part specializing in these things. To get familiar with taking these tests I could run a practice test at home - but the "practice" test I took at home and the live test differed (and I don't mean the questions were different). In the practice test you could skip a question and come back, in the live test you couldn't.
How did they tell you? Through an OK/Cancel dialog popping up, saying "You can not come back to this question. To go to the next question, click Cancel. To stay on the current question, click OK".
Now if you are like 99% of most computer users you expect the OK to perform whatever action you requested (move forward) and Cancel to not do it, so you only read the first sentence and click OK. Only when your finger is moving up from having pressed down the left mouse button do you realize the diabolical nature and disregard of usability principles of the programmers of this test.
For things that can have potentially life changing implications, one should expect a lot more.
Their mistakes have multiplied greatly over the past 5 years, ranging from basic testing errors that wiped out the hopes for several thousand students, to outages that shackled tens of thousands of applicants for a variety of programs, not just in the academic field.
Questions abound over how they managed to obtain half-billion dollar contracts with states. This stems from non-profit organizations that are attached to the corporate body itself. Plus the heavy-handed lobbying and borderline monopoly they have over the instructional book, testing and exam industry.
Sounds like Pearson needs to come under a congressional audit and grilled until they are past well done.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Yeah, it's not the privatization that's an issue, it's the profit part. You know, the incentive that according to the great invisible hand in the sky should improve quality and decrease overhead..
c++;
Here I sit on day 6. Pearson could not deliver my exam because of their system failure. Their "customer service" hours are from 7AM to 7PM Central. As of 8:15AM Central, neither I nor customer service can log on to the system. Pearson's advice continues to be to try using their online system after hours. I can not reschedule the exam that they failed to deliver, a Pearson employee has to do it. So I'm just stuck.
I worked for a direct competor of Pearson and I have had to deal with Pearson and they are a complete nightmare of incompetence to deal with. Trying to explain some of the data that we are exporting from our system and trying to find an api or other means of importing the data within thier systems was a nightmare and nothing better than dealing with Indian developers just woken up out of bed with impossible accents to decifer.
But that aside working for a competor in the same business I found that it was run by a bunch of past educators that wanna be tech gurus. The technology was a complete disaster a hodgepodge of products bought from different vendors not even tested to see if they could be integrated together and sold an promised to work. Not to mention the company motto was to flat out lie to your clients, and thier SSO solution made it possible to gain administrator access for anyway just by passining a paramater in the url. No of thier so called tech experts knew much of anything, and thier principle engineer worked to undermine you if he percieved you knew more than he did. They were a bunch of back stabbers and no one knew anything. I lasted about 2 and 1/2 months before i outright quit. And I can imagine Pearson is run the same way.
Remember all those /. threads with massive rants about "a college degree is just a dumbass piece of paper and only real-world experience is what matters"? So why are we accepting (or why are employers so stupid as to accept) that only with a particular certification exam can someone be hired or retained?
Aside from the absurdity of most or all of these cert. exams, and I'm including bar exams and medical board-recerts, there's really no excuse for an employer who doesn't just say, "Oh, gosh, the test site is borked. We'll hire you with the understanding that some time in the next [month,year] you'll take the exam."
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Because I am an employee at Prometric, I will post anonymously.
We had such a problem too, a few times.
One of the times I remember quite well was a major database crash prevented all IT exams from being taken for 20 hours.
Another time, an construction excavatour cut a power cable in Baltimore next to the headquarters of Prometric and we were without electricity for 2 days... And the world was without any means to take any exams...
And of course there are tons of small outages.
Pearson's normally have a pretty good record comparing to Prometric. The only reason that's the news is because it happened to them.
When your beloved Obama gets through destroying the American economy, there won't even be any test for you to take. There might not even be any electricity to run computers. Just be thankful for this pre-experience that might help you to cope with the disaster soon to come.
Somebody has to write the grant proposals.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
On their FB page PV has been saying, roughly, "we are sorry our exam scheduling is a little bit slow".
Sigh, the testing operation itself has been down or mostly down. (And exam scheduling also.)
It's kind of like Kermit Gosnell taking the public position that
"yes, occasionally, purely by accident, we engaged in a little medicare over-billing."