Who's got a Pearson Vue Test Centre at their school?

[pete]

We've done a fair bit of adult education for a while and someone's floated the idea of becoming a Pearson test centre.

 

Leaving aside the terrible software (BTDT, both as the person taking the tests and the person cursed with administering it), has anyone done this? I've looked at the technical requirements and interpreted it as roughly:

 

• 15 (or less) PCs = workstation setup
  
• Dedicated physical server (no virtual environments supported) for more than 15 PCs
  
• Only 2008 & 2008R2 supported on server (which can't be virtual) for 15+ PCs
  
• Dedicated Internet connection for the room
  
• Fixed partitions between PCs
  
• Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 (10 prohibited)
  
• Local admin rights for people taking, administering or proctoring the tests
  
• Lockable storage for belongings
  
• CCTV in-room or invigilator in-room
  
• Room layout so in-room proctor can view everyone's hands
  
• Exam workstations with 128MB dedicated video ram as a minimum - not entirely sure if an integrated card using a BIOS setting counts
  

 

Is that about right? So far the cost/benefit ratio is swinging a bit too far towards "cost".

[DavePa]

I have been looking at EXACTLY that same thing this afternoon. One thing you missed is the £500 annual cost. Another issue for me is the requirement that monitors are connected by DVI, Displayport or HDMI, what's the problem with VGA?

 

How are they going to access the CCTV - it looks as if this will need a dedicated CCTV setup independent of the rest of the college/school otherwise they will have access to all of the CCTV?

[FN-GM]

My local test center isn't large, but they are now only open Fridays, down from 6 days a week, due to the demand dropping.

[pete]

I have been looking at EXACTLY that same thing this afternoon. One thing you missed is the £500 annual cost. Another issue for me is the requirement that monitors are connected by DVI, Displayport or HDMI, what's the problem with VGA?

 

How are they going to access the CCTV - it looks as if this will need a dedicated CCTV setup independent of the rest of the college/school otherwise they will have access to all of the CCTV?

 

Yup, I did miss the VGA part - we've still got a lot of VGA/Displayport workstations and VGA/HDMI monitors. The cost of doing it would be pulled from Ad Ed funding, but I'm not convinced there'd be enough demand (city nearby with testing centres).

 

Regarding CCTV, I'd lean towards a HD HikVision camera in-room with x days retention sent to a dedicated box. Giving random invigilators access to whole-school CCTV would make ICO very unhappy.

 

The sticking point for us would be the dedicated Internet connection for the exam room. Our broadband contract (emPSN) explicitly forbids a second connection into emPSN, so I'd end up having to air-gap the room and sling in a business ADSL/Fibre line. Implementation wouldn't be cheap and maintenance would be annoying.

Edited June 2, 2016 by pete

[googlemad]

Another example of a company living in 1986 rather than 2016 looking at those requirements!

 

The 'must be a physical rather than a virtual server' is laughable!

[rich_tech]

From my understanding of speaking with a provider, unless you have major throughput on your centre, it can be painful getting paid by Pearson for exams, which is why one here now only opens a couple of days a month, or for their internal training needs, the busier centres in bigger cities open a lot more you find.

[pete]

^ If it were viable (breaks even), we'd be open on set days for external candidates (likely Tues/Wed evenings from 6pm > 10pm). We wouldn't be staffing the centre 9-5/5.

 

I suspect it's not viable. We also looked into becoming a literacy and numeracy centre (for adult learners), thinking "ok, we're a school - we can do that", but instead there's a whole faff-load of new accreditation/audit frameworks because it's coming from the Skills & Funding Agency rather than the EFA.

[Fazza]

We did this a long while ago using a spare server we had lying around and two old PCs. Our Administrator became the invigilator (an online course/certification at the time if I remember correctly) and that was that. When one of us wanted to sit an exam we would schedule it for half-term and put a 'bugger off exam in progress' sign on the door.

[Oaktech]

We used Vue at my last place - we used an existing PC room and dual booted the PC's and put the exam environment on a different Vlan. we used an old RM CC3 server and our 10mb backup line as the default gateway for the vlan.

 

We were doing exams for internal candidates though so we didn't worry about lockers and stuff like that. We didn't use DVI and nobody said anything. CCTV was dealt with by a very limited user account on the CCTV box.