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.

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.

School administrators who hand over the pedagogical reins to a soul-less corporation like Pearson should be held accountable. It's basically an abrogation of administrative duties. Unfortunately universities are slowly being overrun by such charlatans.

I for some reason hate Pearson as much as I hate Comecast and the lot.

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%.

>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.

I would love to hear how this happened.

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...

Thanks for this, interesting stuff!