WJEC Surpass exam website crashed....

[ITGuyNW]

Hi all

 

Anyone else doing any Surpass exams this morning?

 

The system has gone down... We have rung them and they couldn't even get into their own systems... having to resort to the paper back up. We have some students who are mid way through the exam though!

[neb1355]

Yes we're doing them as well.

 

Been testing the program in advance and thought we had everything ironed out... until this morning! What a #''!@~!@~ show! :-(

[chazzy2501]

I was on here just last week moaning that in an exam with 8 pupils 4 had issues.

[sarge]

Our is down too. WJEC reckon the sit should be back up now

[stumot]

We have just had a similar thing here, albeit using the secureclient software, glad to know its not just us!

[ITGuyNW]

It's slowly coming back however all users showing as disconnected. Hopefully it can submit at the end!

[icemonkey]

We've already had one student submit without issue about 10-15 minutes ago. I have 2 clients showing as disconnected so I'm hoping it will attempt to reconnect as they submit their papers...

[PotNoodleTech]

Schools in our LEA having problems with it too.

[sarge]

Students given up . Now on good old pen & paper.

[ItsOnlyAniPad]

Same issue here, first noticed the administration page was slow before it eventually died. Took 15 mins to get a response from WJEC as all the phone lines were busy, eventually were told to move onto paper exam but receive a phone call 20 mins later stating "Exam clients are working fine" and we shouldn't have being told to use paper.

 

Typically we never used the online version of the test were running this morning as the previous subject leader preferred pen and paper ..... I wonder why.

[ITGuyNW]

All ours submitted, phew.

[FN-GM]

Sounds like they DDOSed themselves. Surely they should have know how many people will be sitting the exams from the number of people who registered?

[FishCustard]

That would require planning and foresight, which I think are illegal at exam boards...

[icemonkey]

We ended up with one client which on the "Invigilate" tab was reading as "User Disconnected" but his screen said the exam had been submitted.

 

If anyone else ends up with this....

Turned out the process was still running in the background (software hadn't close properly) killing the process pushed the exam script through

[jthompson]

We lost the website about half way through the exam, for 10-15 mins or so. None of the running exams were interrupted, but we had about a dozen (out of ~30) that were showing as disconnected in the invigilation screen for the remainder of the exam. They submitted okay once the candidates clicked finish, and those that didn't just needed the SecureClient software launching again to get tests uploaded.

 

We usually get SecureClient up and running the day before, and then in plenty of time (up to an hour or so) prior to the start of the exam. It used to be that the client would sync down any scheduled tests when launched, I don't know if it still does. Seems better to get that done as part of the prep ahead of an exam, rather than wait until candidates turn up before launching the software.

[stumot]

We had 3 who managed to get online, 1 submitted but the other two said they couldn't establish a connection, exited and reentered the software as advised in this guide (https://www.aat.org.uk/prod/s3fs-public/assets/AAT-Secureassess-Centre-User-Guide-March-2018.pdf) and when the software reopened it must have submitted it as the invigilator software showed green ticks for them shortly after.