Oxford/Cambridge Admissions Testing Issues

[kentt]

Our exams officer has recieved this reply to a query about the 'difficulties' she had today..

 

Hi,

Our technical team has looked into the root cause of the issue and we can assure you that it wont be repeated again.

Regards,

TCS Test Centre Support Team

 

The cynic in me is not convinced...

 

Thanks for this, as I've not had a reply from their support as yet with the same query.

I guess we will find out tomorrow

[kennysarmy]

Anyone going through a smoothwall been able to unfilter the Live Chat on the "admissionstesting.ox.ac.uk" site?

 

Just keep getting "Currently Live Chat is not available, but you can always connect us below:" - works if we bypass the smoothwall.

 

I've tried allowing:

 

admissionstesting.ox.ac.uk

crosstalk06.tcsion.com

eu-chat-1.haloitsm.com

tcsion.com

 

But still getting a 500 error against : https://crosstalk06.tcsion.com/ws/server?username=null&userlk=null&resource

[nwkeene]

Our exams officer has received this reply to a query about the 'difficulties' she had today..

 

Hi,

Our technical team has looked into the root cause of the issue and we can assure you that it wont be repeated again.

Regards,

TCS Test Centre Support Team

 

The cynic in me is not convinced...

 

I come in today for our single student doing a PAT paper... to find out the Student had been emailed yesterday evening to say it was going to be a physical paper...! The Exams officer only found out this morning..! His answer paper will still need to be uploaded later today... Yesterday's papers could only be uploaded this morning as people were still doing the test in the afternoon...

 

So the 'we can assure you that it wont be repeated again' is true for us in that they've reverted to physical paper exams...

[RLR]

We have been given physical papers today too.

[Brax]

The irony of this thread given the BBC digital exams article the other day. If Oxford and Cambridge can't get it right we've got no hope!

 

Luckily we've been fully paper based here with just a few students typing.

Edited October 20, 2023 by Brax

[DeGrimmy]

We have one student sitting the HAT today - We received an encrypted paper version to use in case of emergency and we expected to hear from them with a password at 9:45 if they were to sit the paper version instead of the online version. We haven't heard anything, so we're just waiting for 11am now... Hopefully we won't have the same issues as we had in the MAT yesterday! Edited October 20, 2023 by DeGrimmy

[southhamster]

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/oct/20/oxford-university-online-admissions-tests-plagued-by-erratic-crashes

 

It's made the papers!

[FragglePete]

We had one student have an absolute melt down. Having shifted them from online to paper, and even with time added they just felt it was wasted effort as the disruption completely threw their mindset for what was essentially a once in a life-time test.

 

Pete

[DeGrimmy]

We had one student have an absolute melt down. Having shifted them from online to paper, and even with time added they just felt it was wasted effort as the disruption completely threw their mindset for what was essentially a once in a life-time test.

 

Pete

 

A member of SLT who had finally managed to talk to someone on the other end of the phone dismissed our student, who was unable to sit the MAT on Thursday, about 15 minutes before the paper version was released. He was visibly not in the right place and mindset to complete the 2 & 1/2 hour test after 2 hours of waiting around while refreshing and hoping the test reconnects.