AWS online exam experience with Pearson VUE
Being able to take the exam at home sounds very nice, whereas my experience with Pearson VUE today to take my AWS SAA-C03 exam isn’t as pleasant.
Comparing taking the exam at a test centre, taking online exam requires:
- At least one pre-check prior to the exam
- 30 mins check-in
- (my own experience) queuing in the line for more than 10 minutes to get a greeter
My exam experience was terrible too. While I was in my zen, the proctor confirmed with me if I could see myself in the webcam. Apparently they could not for some reason, so they had to involve their technical team. During that period of time, I have a chat window blocking a part of my screen and had to check if they sent me anything every time I finished one question, till they decided to reset my session and try again.
Resetting the session basically means kicking me out and queuing for another greeter, going through the environment check process and launching the exam again. Luckily, I could resume from where I left.
The webcam check-up happened again for the second time I entered the exam, but the situation becomes even worse because I couldn’t send through the chat message while the proctor could send messages to me. After a few minutes that I didn’t respond to their queries on my webcam, they started to confirm if everything was okay. I could only launch and typed on the whiteboard and tried if they could see my screen. It seemed they could and they suggested they could hear me, so I could just speak. I asked if my webcam was still an issue, and they said everything was fine please continue the exam.
For a long time after, everything was indeed fine, and I finally had some due peace to answer questions, till I reach the 63rd out of 65 questions. Another proctor sent me a message saying they had to kick me out and relaunch the exam again, but this time, I didn’t get the chance to click the “Relaunch” button. I indeed saw the button for a few seconds, and it flashed and turned into an exam completion page. It’s funny that I was invited to fill a survey at that time. Guess how I would rate my experience 🙃.
I turned off the airplane mode on my phone and checked if anyone from Pearson VUE would call me, in the meanwhile, I started to look for the support options. It took me a while to find it and after the tedious information verification and a long waiting time, the support specialist told me there was already a case under my exam, and they provided the case number to me. I don’t know who created that case, and I didn’t receive any notification for that case creation, but they said this case will be reviewed by the program coordinator and there should be an email sent to me once there is a resolution.
Well, overall I think the online process has replicated the one in test centre quite well. Something I liked when I took my Cloud Practitioner exam a few years ago was being able to flag unsure answers for review at the end. It’s quite nice this feature is still there in this online format, though I didn’t get the chance to review mine today. I don’t exactly remember if there was a comment feature to submit our feedback to the certification team before, but I am generally quite pleased to see this option today.
However, I would certainly not want to choose this online format again for the following reasons:
- The infrastructure of this online test system doesn’t seem to work well here with my ISP (China Telecom, Chengdu, China)
- The online check-in process is a bit cumbersome. Comparing with the experience in a test centre that you only present and show your ID, you have to go through a hardware and network check (even so it still malfunctioned…), taking photos of the ID and environment, queuing for a greeter. All of them are not really hard, but I think it’s more distracting than being at the test centre. I was a bit unprepared and had to adjust my mind when I saw the first question
- The whole exam is recorded, including my facial information. When booking an online exam through the web, it is mandatory to agree that the development teams can use my face to do some machine learning trainings. If I disagree, I will have to book this online exam via phone. I don’t want to go through all the hassles, but I am not genuinely happy with the options I have
- My awful experience today
I saw a preliminary pass or fail result at the end of the exam last time. It’s said SAA-C03 exam is also so. I didn’t get the chance to know my result today because I didn’t reach the final page. Let’s see what’s gonna happen :)
Update on 24 Dec 2022:
I passed this exam with the score 796 out of 1000. This is the breakout of my score performance:
I received the badge from Credly first yesterday before going to bed. At 4:00am today, two emails from AWS were sent to me. One is to grant my certificate on SAA-C03. Surprisingly, there is another to recertify my Cloud Practitioner certificate, so it seems the expiry date of the Cloud Practitioner certification will keep being extended if I continue to gain higher certification.
Till now, no one from Pearson VUE has contacted me via any channel. Well, since I have passed this exam anyway, I suppose this is the best I would wish as well. I am interested to know if I could meet all the compentencies given all the time and ease to which I should have been entitled, but I would leave this shame as a goal for the future.