Cambridge BMAT exams

[clareq]

It's running here - after initially telling the students to install the already installed extension - refreshing the page fixed that. I hope the exam is easier than getting it to run!

[msi_school]

I only have two students doing this exam and only one at a time so it was very simple here, I had already installed the extension by following the instruction here and other than the candidate taking ages to check all here pencils where sharp. it was as painless as using Examwritepad

[Simcfc73]

We've just had one where he finished the first and second test and when he clicked continue it finished his test.. missing number 3.

 

45 minute wait on the phones too

[pete]

Ours went ahead without issue. Though the site seemed rather laggy at ~08:50 this morning.

[kennysarmy]

100%

 

Just quickly setup three laptops from our library batch - offline account. Bypass smoothwall. Boom. Done.

 

All would have worked well if the exam department had read my email about using offline accounts !!!!

[FragglePete]

Quite straight forward for us too - only the 1 student, laptop off the domain logged in as local admin with all the extensions pre-installed and checked. No real bother at all, but I pity you if you had a lot of students.

 

Pete

[box_l]

We had to add an exclusion in Senso.cloud logging and filtering policy to get the "allow webcam" popup to work.

[jslate1980]

We had to add an exclusion in Senso.cloud logging and filtering policy to get the "allow webcam" popup to work.

What did you exclude? I didn't get the popup but didn't cause any issue.

[AJWhite1970]

We did 7 students today, all went OK apart from them trying to take pictures of their passports, you've never seen anything like it, all angles and retakes trying to get it focused and not shiny because of the laminate....

 

Another 7 to do tomorrow morning

[Simcfc73]

Just me then with issues.

[Steve21]

Just me then with issues.

 

In the exam instructions that’s read out it says about not clicking continue etc as it’ll auto progress when the timer runs out on a section

 

Just wonder if they happened to click continue just after the timer auto moved forward thus skipping the last part?

 

Steve

[Mako]

We did 7 students today, all went OK apart from them trying to take pictures of their passports, you've never seen anything like it, all angles and retakes trying to get it focused and not shiny because of the laminate....

 

Another 7 to do tomorrow morning

 

I think the instructions said that if the student is known to the school and has photographic ID provided by the school, they can just take another image of themselves rather than the ID. At least that's what the exams officer said. Our students still preferred to take photos of their ID because it was "embarrassing" to take a second photo of themselves.

[box_l]

@jslate1980

 

We had set our chrome policy to force install the extension, to allow the extension, (we block all except whitelisted ones), and to allow the camera for the testing urls.

 

Without the popup asking for access to the camera the set would not progress.

Adding to this section of the logging and blocking policy allowed us to get the popup and then all was well.

 

Allow the following IP addresses to bypass the SSL Filter

|mettl.com|mercermettl.com

Cheers

 

Box

Edited November 5, 2020 by box_l

[BFCIT]

We've just had one where he finished the first and second test and when he clicked continue it finished his test.. missing number 3.

 

45 minute wait on the phones too

 

We had 15 students taking part in the BMAT yesterday. Of the 15, three of those were hit with an issue, where section 1 and 2 of the exam loaded fine, section 3 would not load. Strangely it worked perfectly fine for the other 13.

 

Technical support telephone took 45 minutes for them to answer, support we received was very poor. We didn't want to close/refresh the page as the instructions stated this action will auto-submit the test. We were eventually told to cold shutdown the machines and re-login and attempt again. Once we finally managed to get through to somebody to get this advice, the students had 2 minutes to complete section 3.

 

Glad it was not just my site with issues!

[synaesthesia]

Worst thing about this is the pure lack of this mentioned in the documentation - this all clearly states there is no additional software to install, it's all browser based. If we'd known that, it'd not have taken long to force install the extension for either Chrome or Edge and test it. But no, we find this out last minute and have 10 minutes to push it out hoping it works

[Simcfc73]

Todays went fine so I wonder if it was user error. Our Exams officer did the demo and had popup prompts whenever she did anything wrong.

 

We've asked Mettl who said they can't see any issues and Cambridge pointed back to Mettl so we've had to lodge an appeal for extraordinary circumstances.

[Mako]

We had a hiccup of the SmoothWall deciding to fall over itself which required a reboot yesterday. Interestingly the tests told the candidates that the timer had been paused. There must be something in the browser extension that checks for a connection.

 

On Wednesday, some of the images did not load for the candidate on some of the questions, so the exams officer is applying for special consideration.

[gh5000]

We had 15 students taking part in the BMAT yesterday. Of the 15, three of those were hit with an issue, where section 1 and 2 of the exam loaded fine, section 3 would not load. Strangely it worked perfectly fine for the other 13.

 

Technical support telephone took 45 minutes for them to answer, support we received was very poor. We didn't want to close/refresh the page as the instructions stated this action will auto-submit the test. We were eventually told to cold shutdown the machines and re-login and attempt again. Once we finally managed to get through to somebody to get this advice, the students had 2 minutes to complete section 3.

 

Glad it was not just my site with issues!

Had exactly the same issue here. The header section was showing but there was no question and answer underneath. Gave up on technical support with 18 mins to go and braved a reload.

 

That time the question loaded but the text box for the answer wasn't there.

 

The girl finally got on with 15 mins to go.

[v1images]

Bit late to the party but this tested and worked great on Chromebooks.

[SpaceInvader83]

Bit late to the party but this tested and worked great on Chromebooks.

We also used Chromebooks, worked a charm!