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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.
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?
... 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
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!
I tried to look at their Facebook page but the entire Facebook site appears to be down. If Slashdot managed to trash Facebook, you can bet your toasted hard drives that there will be outrage, panic and Congressional Blue Ribbon committees.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
I took my CCNA exam there last year. Halfway through, one of the simulations completely froze... absolutely nothing would respond other than the timer continuing to count down. I had the woman running the exam come in and check it out, she agreed that it wasn't supposed to completely freeze up. They refused to let me refund or reschedule the exam.
It's called a sharpener.
Learn to love Alaska
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"?
In a sense, some of the same perverse incentives that drive fiascos like the EA/SimCity server-meltdown launch are probably at work with a testing company:
The greater the local storage of exams and answer keys, the easier it would be for them to leak, and the easier it would be for local employees/franchised locations to provide off-the-book 'services', for their own personal gain. The more you tie to HQ(eg. certainly don't have scoring capabilities onsite, ideally have only thin clients that dial in to HQ) the more control you have. Of course, this means going from a fairly robust system(all the tests Pearson administers would amount to what? a few tens of gigabytes, if there is any multimedia component, with relatively infrequent changes? You could probably keep the testing centers in step with rsync over dialup...) to a brittle one; but that never seems to stop anybody...
There are mutliple testing centers, but they are all exclusive. Prometric offers The Open Group testing, so you can still take a test and get TOGAF certified if you want, but Cisco is apparently available exclusively on Vue, and most seem to be that way, where only one tester delivers any single test, but there are multiple options for testing. No idea how it got to that without illegal collusion, but that's what we have now.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
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.
If only the people who wrote the test could have taken a test to prove their competence.
An important change for education.
This is actually very common for Pearson Vue, and I have never heard of them allowing someone to take the exam again without having to pay full price. It happens so often I wonder if it's part of the revenue stream.
Basically.. "People need certification for work or they wont earn their income, so if we screw them they have no choice but to pay again to get it complete. If this happens to 2% of people, we get an instant revenue bump from those people paying twice."
It's fraud, but no one seems to want to do anything about it.
She can't refund you there, because you didn't pay her. You paid Vue, so you must go to them for the refund. Silly, I know, but that's how it works. She should have gotten out her Vue test center 800 number and called support, and if Vue support can't fix it remotely, then you get your money back.
I used to work at a test center (also a VAR and training center).
Learn to love Alaska
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'm sorry, but a 5 hour delay is NOT "up, but at a reduced capacity" at they claim. Failing to deliver an EIGHT HOUR exam for 5 hours is an outage. You show up at 7AM and the exam can't be run until noon? So you're taking an exam until 8PM? Ridiculous. People all over the globe are unable to schedule or reschedule exams. They are showing up at testing centers only to be turned away because the center can't deliver the exam - Pearson's servers are unreachable. Calls to customer service offer no assistance other than "We can't log in, try again tomorrow."
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."
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++;
It is partially local and partially remote.
Local admin station downloads the test before you take it and serves it to the test stations where you take it. This prevents connectivity issues from affecting you when you're already taking the exam. In such scenario you could complete exam, be scored however your results wouldn't be submitted to the VUE servers until connectivity is restored.
However if the admin station is unable to download the exams in the first place, then you cannot even start the exam.