Pearson Vue Now On Day 5 of Massive Outage 151
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.
UK Driving License (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
DRM = single point of failure (Score:0, Interesting)
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.
I graded standardized math exams (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Posting anonymous since there was a NDA (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Used to Deal With Them as Consultant (Score:4, Interesting)
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.