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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!
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?
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"?
... 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
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!
Uh... Prometric, LSAC, and ETS are all private corporations, albeit nonprofit.
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.
Not sure if trolling... or just wildly delusional and somehow entrusted with a keyboard...
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.
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.
Could be deeper than your trolling presumes. Consider that this outage comes after some of their exams were found to be scoring incorrectly. Perhaps what you're seeing is an actual (don't hold your breath) audit going on, as tests are vetted..... who knows, perhaps for the first time.
Would it change outcomes? We may never know. Too bad that they're not on the front line, trying to explain the outage after the first few hours. Perhaps there is chaos in the backroom, perhaps someone dug up their data lines with a trencher, but we just don't know. Perhaps a PR firm might be useful at this point, but when you're a cash cow, you need no PR. Right?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You can think the suits who don’t really understand technology and why we need redundant systems and links.
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.
eh? what major OS is NOT used to run OO languages?
I am, at least a little, willing to listen.
I don't get it. Please explain where you're coming from and what you're trying to express (clearly and use short words 'cause I'm dumb) with this statement.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
This is most likely a software and platform bug, from my experience which is a fair bit the majority of software bugs are generated from OO based languages and programmers who don't really understand computer arch. So I'm willing to just go ahead and blame all the programmers who think languages like C++, C# and Java are good ideas, and who think Windows is a good platform to use to run anything. I'm willing to bet if this entire system was based on C and ran in a pure Linux environment it would be fine.
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.
That depends on the test you're trying to take. Some tests are only available through one of the providers.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Thank you. I was sure you had a reason. I am unable to agree with that reasoning with the scant evidence at hand and your conclusions seem like huge leaps and maybe even blaming a language for the error that is people but I can see where you're coming from now.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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
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.
Perhaps you missed the "unable to agree" in my comment? I didn't agree, I was civil. There is a difference. I opted to be civil as it was the more noble road and I felt like being idealistic. I am not sure but I think the world would be in better shape if more people did that.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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++;
Exactly how would the exact problem causing this particular outage be prevented by some vaporous open source software developed by the lowest paid programmers on earth?
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.
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.
It is the fact that these are run by people seeking to make a profit that is the problem. If it was a government-run exam, it wouldn't matter if it got fucked up, the government would have to let you do it again.
Open source software can go wrong just the same as DRM'd proprietary software.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The NCEES, the organization in charge of testing Engineers and Land Surveyors for their licensing is moving on 2014 to computer based testing for the Fundamentals Exam. The NCEES has quite a pull, so it could be an audit. I hope that this doesn't happen while the NCEES begins the testing period next year.
Consider that this outage comes after some of their exams were found to be scoring incorrectly
Not just scoring. When I took the LPIC exam, some of the ("correct" answers to) questions were either very misleading or just factually incorrect. Mostly, this was due to the test being massively out-of-date, but still having answers based on extremely dated versions of Linux.
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
Somebody has to write the grant proposals.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
As somebody who does have a clue about system architecture, computer architecture, and programming languages....
The very simple reason that the majority of bugs are generated from OO languages is that the majority of software is written in OO languages. That doesn't mean that OO languages are any worse to write code in. I do think C++ is a good idea in a wide range of applications, and I do think modern Windows, despite my complaints about it, is a perfectly adequate platform. (And some of my complaints are "That's not how Unix did it", since I'm baby-ducked on Unix/Linux.)
Linux is also a perfectly adequate platform for this sort of application, but C is not as good a language to write these things in. There's much more opportunity for bugs in complex applications, and indeed C++ can do anything C can do. I'd recommend C++ over C, if only for the container class templates. If you're comparing an expert with C on Linux with a mediocre programmer using Visual C#, the expert will do better, but that's because of the quality of the human involved.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes