pearson view online exams this is a review of my experience doing a pearson view online exam okay so i'm going to be talking about a proctored exam now proctored exam means that there is an invigilator if you know what that means that's basically somebody who's keeping an eye on you to check you're not cheating so i'm going to talk about that i'm going to talk about uh yeah the whole experience from start to finish now obviously this has been quite uh drastically affected by kovid and the global pandemic and in the uk obviously it's still an option or still the best way and possibly even the only way to take a professional exam for instance if you're trying to get a cisco ccna cisco cc whatever you know juniper f5 oracle amazon microsoft any of these certifications you will need to take via pearson view now traditionally you would drive or travel to a test center sign in hand over your passport or some form of id take off your belt take off your shoelaces empty your pockets put all your possessions into a locker and then you would go into an exam room and sit at a desk and they would log you in and then you would begin your exam and they would watch you via cctv so having counted up i've actually taken nine of these exams and um they cost in between 100 and i think the cisco ccnp exam was actually 240 pounds which is probably 280 300 dollars now for those of you lucky enough to have a good employer they will typically pay these fees but if you're not in a job or you're self-employed or your contractor you'll need to pay these fees and they soon rack up for instance to achieve cisco ccmp it cost me three lots of 240 pounds and that would then last for three years and then after three years you have to retake one of them to renew the certification so yeah not to be sniffed that it's it's something which is best if you can get your employer to pay for it however i couldn't so to be so to avoid becoming a dinosaur in my industry i thought i would just take advantage of some free study materials provided by oracle oci oracle cloud infrastructure now there's a foundation exam which you can pretty much pass with the free study material and the exam was actually reasonably priced around about 88 pounds i believe it might have been 82 i can't remember i'll need to look it up so i booked it and i read this training material for approximately two weeks you may have seen another video which i'll put the link for which is where i did the online lab session which was also free you can create a compute instance a virtual cloud network you can edit the security lists uh you can create a an apache server and you can ssh into it via a linux vm which is also part of the lab session um so yeah i did that and then i on the day of the exam as per the instructions i logged in early and let's talk about what happened next so the first thing i did was i cleared my desk as per the instructions and i also unplugged or sorry i didn't unplug but i powered off my monitors so i've got two mon a monitor either side of my main screen so i turned those off cleared the desk and then i clicked on the link in the email from when i registered for the exam and then i waited for i think it was probably between five and ten minutes for a little pop-up chat screen to appear waiting for that i actually had a message which said you are held in a queue first i was number one in the queue and then it went to zero and then i had error connecting retrying and then for about another two or three minutes i went from three to two to one in the queue to being chatted to by somebody called anu a-n-n-u so if you're watching i knew you weren't that helpful really so oh yeah i also forgot to mention i'd had to enter my exam passcode which is fine once i did that it asked me to upload a photo of my workstation and the surroundings so to the left of me to the right of me behind me and in front of me and basically all i was doing was taking a photo of a blank wall behind me and it was such a small room i was sat in my house that it was quite difficult to actually take any meaningful photos but i did that and then i had to upload those from my phone um so yeah you need to make sure you've got plenty of um plenty of battery life on your phone because um without that you know okay so by this time i had uploaded my photos of my workstation and my room i had established a chat messenger kind of screen with anu and then i knew us this was all about um probably 15 minutes after first starting to log in so by this time i was already aware that the time to the exam was fast approaching and it was scheduled for 10 30 am and i was fully aware of it also if you did not make the time then you forfeited your exam so or you lost your money and you couldn't take the exam so um yeah that nobody actually said that you know this is fine just because there's a delay with us administering the exam you're still fine so whilst waiting for uh for the exam to begin anu then asked me to show that both of my other monitors were unplugged so i actually had to then start dismantling my home office and this is fair enough obviously if somebody had three monitors they could be cheating and reading the answers off the other screen but if you're being watched by a webcam and you oh yeah the other thing was this was all being recorded so um there was a red circle in the screen saying recording um so already you just think well this is quite secure this is you know this doesn't really give up much opportunity for cheating so why do i actually have to crawl around some plug in all of my monitors and oh yeah the other thing was there was a biro on my desk and yeah without any courtesy whatsoever just had one liner say remove pen okay so hopefully you're with me so far so i've i've clicked on the email i've logged in i've uploaded photos of my driving license as a former photo id i photographed my home office left right forward behind me i've uploaded all those i've unplugged my monitors my second and third monitors i've removed the pen from my desk which was otherwise clear and then i've kind of just waited and waited and eventually anu said okay starting the exam this is where the fun began so once he had clicked start exam i thought well that's good job done so we're we're up and running now and um yeah i really wanted to get just get going because i was fairly confident i was going to pass it and yeah it was a hot day and i just wanted to get it done and move on so first things first there was i think there was a button to say start once you click start exam um then believe it or not there was a pop-up with three choices and i think it was sort of okay cancel and the third choice was um closed task no or closed program what it detected was about six months ago when i was uh working with a client um i was having to use selenium remotely on his machine uh it's a long story i won't bore you with but because he was then getting tired of the endless testing um yeah bug um yeah tip to you there selenium and testing if you ever do a selenium project allow hours and hours for testing anyway he was getting frustrated i said just let me stay on your machine and remote on and it was uh i believe it was um any view i don't it does it makes no difference it could have been team viewer it could have been logged me in or whatever anyway the the software on the exam had scanned my machine and obviously it had done a scanning through the registry or whatever and it detected that i had this remote software running as a background service in windows oh that's the other thing you can only take this exam with mac or windows um now obviously the exam i was taken was actually an oracle exam and oracle um oracle i write oracle have always promoted developed whatever uh linux so the fact that i was already slightly miffed that i could not take this exam using my main linux mint pc or my i've got uh also i've got fedora laptop and i've got a manjaro laptop so i've got three linux computers and a couple of raspberry pi's but yeah so scanned the system it found these two background programs right this is where the fun began because i had no way of doing of ending these services without quitting the exam i've subsequently realized that this was probably because when i was trying to bring up task manager of control delete i don't know but i think windows was potentially throwing up the task manager window either on screen two or screen three um so it might it may have been popping up but i couldn't see it and i had the only way i could close uh close any view or any of these services in the background was to close the exam well i say that was the only way it shouldn't have been because all this time i was being viewed or supposedly i was being viewed over a webcam with a little red circle in the top saying recording and somebody was being paid to proctor i think i believe proctor means kind of monitor or watch so yeah what was annu doing and i would love to have recorded it obviously i couldn't because i was obeying all of the the rules but for about five minutes i was frantically waving pointing my fingers at the screen screaming at the screen shouting at the screen just going berserk and nobody noticed so what does that tell you it tells you that you're not actually being proctored really whoever's at the other end is either way too busy or not doing their job properly i don't care which because i've paid 80 quid 80 pounds and i've not got what i asked for or what i was sold so as far as i'm concerned person view you should really hang your head in shame over this um it's bicycle yeah so that was procted exam once the exam allegedly began i was waving my arms around screaming at the screen swearing at the screen and i was doing this probably for about five minutes i it felt like more but i don't want to exaggerate so i would say five minutes five minutes i was waving arms shouting i could now this is the bit this is the important bit and i'm not advising you to do this but i could have got a textbook i could have got my notes i could have got my kindle could have got a laptop my phone i could have done anything i could have been looking up the answer to all these questions and they wouldn't have noticed they would not have noticed because despite the fact that they were recording i you can't tell me that they go back and watch these recordings the whole point of being proctored is so that they can observe you whilst you're taking the exam once the exam's finished i really really don't think that they're going to go back and look at the recording maybe they do have you ever taken a an online exam and they've gone back and looked at the recording and and then messaged you to say that you sneezed or that you looked down at the floor and then your exams void because they think you were cheating i really don't think that is the case so personal view do not record me take 80 pounds off me and then fail to acknowledge me when i have a technical problem which is beyond my control and all this time i knew that the problem would be as soon as i tried to bring up task manager any other way the only option left to me was to close the window which effectively closed the exam and then to actually restart the exam i was thinking it was almost certain that i would then be late for the exam because i would have to go through the entire registration sign-on process again and i was so angry i had to go away for 10 minutes and by the time i came back and tried to retake the exam all i got was a message saying your exam is expired or you've missed the date for it or i can't remember i'm so angry i couldn't really remember and my head wasn't clear but pearson view please give me my money back i'm not currently employed 80 pounds might not be much to you but it's a lot to me i'm even getting angry talking about that because i'm again pearson view shocking absolutely shocking how you can say it's proctored how you can say it's an online exam and make me unplug my entire home office get photographs of everything remove the biro from my desk and then have the cheek to ignore me when i'm jumping up and down for five minutes i really think that is poor and if any of you have had similar experience uh or if any of you have actually cheated um you don't have to give me too many details but just say say yeah person viewer shambles and you can cheat exams now this is the other thing i've now emailed them to say that why why do i have to go for all these jump through all these hoops when you only have to go on youtube and if you've watched one of my recent videos you'll see where i was actually using pi tesseract to scan or not scan to take screen um effectively take a screenshot 25 screenshots a second and then do ocr so what is the point what's the point of being ultra secure when there are dumps out there it makes a mockery of the whole exam system it's the money-making racket and i know this sounds angry sounds it i am angry 80 pounds is even in england for me that's almost that's about a day's pay okay so you've probably got the gist of what happened with this exam so um i'm not going to rant about it anymore all i need all i'm going to say is if you're going to do the exam do it on a laptop make sure you've got no software running so before you even attempt it open up task manager and just close all of the processes what they call services and windows close all of your windows services yeah make make sure you've got nothing in the background not even a make sure you've not even got a pencil on your table and you'll do fine well i'm guessing you will but don't expect the exam to be fully proctored because from my experience and it's just me i'm not saying this happens to everybody for from my experience the whole exam was a shambles because how can it be secure how can it be secure when i literally was jumping up and down swearing at the screen for at least five minutes um this makes a mockery of the whole exam online exam system um i was actually looking forward to it because in the old days i used to have to drive probably a three hour round trip to reading once i drove to pool another time i drove to bridgewater so these are all three hour round trips and obviously if if you're paying your own petrol that's expensive you're paying parking in reading that was eight pounds so to take an exam if you're taking a day off of your own time you're paying for the fuel you're paying for the parking and the exam this could cost you over 300 pounds well in the old days it would have done i don't know what the current cost is for a cisco exam online obviously the oracle one that i was attempting to take was much cheaper and i would have guessed that's because oracle were trying to claw some market share from uh microsoft and amazon with um obviously with azure and aws um to be honest i'm not really that i'm not i'm all i'm cross about is losing my money oh yeah so the final thing just to finish off about is moan and then we'll look at some countryside the final problem when i tried to contact um pearson view um the only way you can go to their website and try and contact them i can't find a way so you'll go on there and it says contact us or something then you're presented with a page full of questions and unless your question matches um one of their existing questions on the page there's no other way to contact them um i don't know maybe you can go on linkedin and find the boss of pearsonview and email him direct or something to be honest i think that's a long shot and he's probably fed up of getting so many ira exam takers emails that he's probably kind of um no i don't think that's that's even even even an option so yeah to try and contact pearson vue with a problem which is not really your fault and i had a legitimate reason for not being able to take the exam that was their software had given me no option but to quit and then as soon as i quit i missed the exam slot i can fully imagine them even if i had got hold of them they would just then say well we'll give you a new exam voucher to be honest you can stick it up here i don't even want to take the exam anymore i was i was not that enthusiastic to start with and i was kind of forcing myself to do it because sometimes you have to force yourself to do things you don't want to really i just want to try and i was only attempting to kind of stay relevant and just have some broad knowledge of cloud infrastructure and to be honest whether i'd done a microsoft examining an aws exam or an oracle exam probably the same thing would have happened um so oracle i have a word for pearson view why do i have to use a windows computer firstly two have a word of have oracle please could you have a word of pearson view and just say you've got a very unhappy customer and potentially i'm a ccnp network engineer i've got cisco ccmp that is not a trivial exam i don't mess about oracle you could have a ccmp network engineer moving across to take more and more of your exams and i'm sure you want to compete with with other cloud providers you've lost me i i'm not going to be doing any more exams anytime soon for start i'm not upgrading to windows 11 or windows 10 point whatever so i've pretty much been my windows computer and whenever i start it up now i get messages saying that it's not secure need to upgrade blah blah blah no and any of you have watched before you'll know that i'm not upgrading it because as soon as you i try to upgrade windows 10 it then forces me to uninstall vm workstation which is what but virtually for past year and a half look at my channel all of my scrapey all of all of my videos have pretty much been done on a linux distro whether ubuntu or linux mint using vmworkstation so yeah why why does everybody have to use windows or mac to take an exam surely well oracle should know i mean java why can why can an exam not be taken from linux android chromebook whatever yeah i've got a chromebook as well so i've got a chromebook three two linux laptops a linux mint pc and i've got an old hard drive which i had to go into the bios and then make my make my pc boot from so i could take the exam using windows 10 and then this random service that was running in a background that i didn't even know was on there to be honest what was going to happen with some if you're proctoring the exam then surely if somebody's got remote software on their screen um can you not see no you probably can't but even so surely you would see them surely you would see them randomly typing when really to take um to take an exam you only need the mouse it was multiple choice so if you were seeing somebody doing lots and lots of typing or a screen sharing then surely you would see somebody typing when anyway i don't care the exam was a complete waste of my money my time and oracle have a person view because there are shambles pearson view i've taken nine exams with you over ten years all of them have been proctored and i've had to travel to a test center and as much as that cost me lots of money it got the job done i passed every single one however i will not be taking any of your more any more remote online proctored exams the staff were rude and helpful and you have no method of contact now i want my money back if you don't this video will stay up here other people can watch it they can decide for themselves they might just think i've got an axe to grind but really all i'm doing is explaining how you have no form of contact and you do not proctor your exams correctly well you not even correctly you do not monitor the exam takers at all i was yelling at the screen five minutes and you took no notice so well done bye-bye you
2021-07-25