
Trainee doctors left 'crying' after computer glitch crashes online exam - jen729w
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-20/trainee-doctors-left-distressed-after-online-exam-aborted/9464936
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singingboyo
It appears the exam was online for the first year, and was administered by
Pearson Vue, the same Pearson responsible for MyMathLab and others.

I can't say I'm surprised that the system crashed, given that. Pearson
software is just generally unreliable and unpleasant to use. I don't believe
they deserve anyone's business, but unfortunately it appears to be very
difficult to start separating colleges from Pearson.

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ateesdalejr
I can agree with you on that. Every time I've taken an SAT or some other state
test online I've ended up with Pearson. Their software in general is pretty
janky.

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fifteenforty
I can’t emphasise how big a deal this is for the doctors and hospitals
involved. It’s very difficult to organise the rosters to allow this exam to
happen. This exam is high stakes and difficult. The pass mark is only 50-60%.

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parliament32
>This is the first time the exam was done online and was run by the
international IT company Pearson Vue on behalf of the RACP.

Not surprising. I remember dreading any university course that had online
"tools" run by Pearson.

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willbw
I would love to hear how this happened.

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jmts
At a previous job, I had to investigate a similar issue where some online
exams were being terminated early. The overall scheme worked out something
like this:

    
    
      1. students connect to the online system
      2. load balancers assign each connection to a server from a pool of 8 or so
      3. students start the test
      4. a single server responsible for monitoring test duration, checks all open test instances, and terminates those that have exceeded the test time limit
    

The issue ended up being that a single one of the load balanced servers had
its time set slow. That meant that when the terminator server came along, the
students had their test end according to the time delta between the server
assigned their connection, and the terminator server. Amusingly, it took some
time to convince the sysadmin to check their times - they were convinced that
they'd manually corrected all the system times after the last power outage...

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willbw
Thanks for this, interesting stuff!

