Pearson VUE Reviews

This is going to be a rant, so only read if you like rants: P
I spoke with a representative to schedule a test for work; she scheduled me for the wrong date. I had a lot of trouble understanding her (and clearly vice versa) as she was not a native speaker; Pearson doesn't hire native speakers because it's more expensive. When I looked through my emails to confirm the time a few weeks later I saw the mistake and tried to fix it, but it was too late. Pearson informed me they couldn't help me reschedule my test, and the testing agency (ASCP) told me it was my fault and that I would have to pay an additional $200 to sign up to take a online automatically graded test certifying me to be a medical diagnostics technologist. Currently the job I have pays me about $15 an hour (I have a master's degree in STEM, another rip off) and $200 is just too much. The people working for human resources at these companies can't possibly understand that as (1) they are in human resources and (2) they are greedy, lazy and unethical thieves. Luckily for me I just got a job I prefer and don't have to take the test after all, but I wanted to take it since I've been studying for it for months, and I SHOULD have been able to.
I already had experience with Pearson in the past, first as a student when they started adding online codes to books to make them more expensive. Later as a content developer I wrote content for them under contract. They paid very little for writing content that they made a great deal of money from, to the extent of preferring poorly written content with questionable accuracy. We eventually lost our contracts as it was never cheap enough, probably sent that overseas too. But I guess cheap and poorly made is what everyone wants these days.

User Experience??... they never heard a bit of it....
Client Orientation?? ... what the hack!...
Alignment of Instructions and UI?? ... it for losers!

How dare you to waste people money and time with your poor service?? I should sue you but my time doing so it is not worth it. Coming from IT background and working for the industry I feel genuine shame for such incompetent service. You cause pain to so many people around the world, students and professionals. But deep inside you do not give a damn because you are market leader.
You HAVE TO make sure your customer is having the correct requirements before hand. To do so, you have to do check in at least 24 hours before!

Worst service, people!

What a rude piece of trash so-called person that works the front desk at this location. She sits behind her mask her plastic shield making you stand 10 feet away while speaking quietly enough for the testers and loudly enough for her. Every verb she uses is slanted with attack and nastiness. She may not call you a jerk to your face but she certainly expresses it in every other way physically possible. I pray this woman loses her job, and Pearson Vue gets their act together. Because you give this person way too much opportunity to affect peoples life. This woman I hope you read it you are trash trash trash! Ma’am you are an absolute disgust to the human race. I feel bad for your knee brace and crappy outfit.

Bad customer service. Testing online was awful. Worst experience testing. I spent 7hrs dealing with technical difficulties and was not able to take my test. I have taken many tests and this has been one of the worst experiences ever. I don’t know why they chose this company to do the testing for them but I hope they never do it again. They couldn’t do their own troubleshooting. Everyone seemed lost and unprepared to manage what they are doing. Very scripted but so not helpful at all.

I had originally scheduled my CIMA case study exam for Thursday the 13th May @ 7am. I conducted two successful system tests. I then proceeded to check in @ 6.30 am as instructed. However the check in process failed and froze/hung on two separate occasions. I was advised by someone (named Shivram) in chat that there were technical difficulties. I was asked if I was running a VPN. I confirmed I wasn't
I relaunched the OnVue App a third time (my 7am start time had passed at this stage) and managed to successfully make it to the Check In Queue stage. And then I was just left there. Time passed. I got no update. No one contacted me via chat. There was no Help button or chat function I could open to request help. I just sat there for 40 minutes. I wasn't sure what to do.
I eventually quit, went to the Pearson website and initiated the customer support chat. The customer support operator (named Dinah) took my details, went through the details of my story and secured me an exam reschedule for May 14th at 1.30pm.
So far so frustrating
Logged in today and began the check in process @ 1pm. Everything went smoothly. My exam launched @ 1.30pm and I began my tutorial. My Exam proctor was named Rebecca.
I confirmed some details with the proctor, confirmed my video recorder and microphone was working.
Spent 10 or so minutes going through a tutorial and then began my exam.
About 20 minutes in, my exam was shut down. Was told I was speaking aloud and was warned against exam conduct. I was not speaking aloud but had coughed several times. I acknowledged and was allowed back in the exam. I did not want to challenge or question the proctor for obvious reasons
Soon after I was told via chat that I was now mumbling. Again I was not. My room was completely silent. with about 12 or so minutes of my first 45 minutes of section one remaining, my exam was abruptly cancelled. It was cancelled before I could acknowledge the second warning
No one reached out to me. I was not allowed back into the exam. I was not speaking aloud, mumbling or making any other kind of noise. I was moving my finger along the screen as I was reading the text (so as not to lose where I was) but I was not making any sounds.
I again contacted the customer support via Pearson website. They took my details and said they would open a "Case".
I feel very strongly that I was removed from my exam without justification and that I did not break any exam policy. I behaved exactly as I would in an exam test centre. Technical difficulties on their side prevented me from sitting the exam on Thursday and my Friday afternoon exam was cancelled abruptly without due cause in my opinion.
As a result, six weeks of study are down the tubes, I'm down my exam fee and I now have to wait until August to re-sit. I feel I have been very badly messed around by Pearson.
I will not use this service again. I would strongly recommend that no one uses this service. FOr a CIMA exam or anything else.

You will likely have a bad experience throughout the test.
1) You can only login 30 minutes before and there's a lot to do.
2) You may get all the way thru the registration, and are waiting to be let into the exam after the see your video, but even while you can see your video, they can't. And they'll ask you to restart the application (and the registration).
3) After restarting, they still might not see your video. They'll ask you to try another computer.
4) If you ask a question, they may just close the chat or ignore you. (I asked if I would still have time to log in because by now it's 14 minutes past the exam start time).
5) Login to the application on a second computer, but you can't get past the start screen because it's been 15 minutes.
6) Call them and listen to the longest automated introduction ever.
7) Be told there's nothing they can do. Have to reschedule.

This was the WORST testing experience I have
every had in my life -- unprofessional,
distracting, and poor customer service. I was
interrupted at list 5+ times over things that
were not even happening by like 5 different
people. At one point it felt like harassment
and I could hardly focus on my exam. All issues,
unless blatantly against guidelines should be
addressed BEFORE the exam is release, NOT
during. Additionally, I was consistently
questioned of a HEAD WRAP, is a culturally
piece of clothing for Black/African American
women. My head wrap did not cover my ears,
mouth, or eyes and was in not inappropriate.
However, I was argue, this issue was based in
biases and discrimination. Secondly, there was like a whole conversation amongst proctors in the chatbox while my exam was going on with people discussing my head wrap. Absolutely ridiculous.

The customer service, proctors and general handling of the exams is really bad. I took two different privacy exams. Halfway through each one their system crashed three times in total. There was no way to reach anyone, the chat was not working. I waited about 15mins and had to end the second exam. This threw me and stressed me out even more. When I eventually got to speak with someone in the chat the proctors said time would be allocated at the end of the exams which never happened. I was also told that a case would be opened which again never happened. It really is a horrible, unprofessional service, very disappointing.. The proctors are rather rude and unhelpful and frankly do not seem to care. I would never recommend them to anyone.

Not a good experience at all. They, Pearson VUE, more or less robbed me of $249. First there were tremendous problems in system testing my laptop with their software. After having downloaded 60MB of software it wouldn't even start to a 1 year old Lenovo laptop with Windows 10. I didn't receive an error message or any other response, nothing. And, the support didn't have a clue. So I tried it with another of my laptops, also Windows 10, and it finally worked.
The real issue came during the exam, their software suddenly went down becoming completely unavailable, without warning or anything. I couldn't reach it, the clock was ticking, and my dear 65 mins were reducing rapidly. And the software came back after about 15 mins. An already stressful test situation became impossible and I called the proctor to tell her about the incident. She hadn't noticed a thing (what are they actually doing on the other side of the screen then?) and she asked me if I wanted to cancel the test. She couldn't seem to understand the difference between me cancelling the test and wanting to have another test due to the crash. She raised a ticket, 056.959.02, and I have no idea what she said in that. Anyhow, now, after 7 working days the team responsible for looking into it has come back and said the test was not interrupted, and if something anyhow had gone wrong it must have been due to my laptop, for which I'm responsible. I'm completely flabbergasted. I believe every customer in that process will always come out guilty. How awful they are! Considering everyone's bad experience, how can they still have any customers? Me, I'll never do a test for them again!

I had the same EXACT experience as Tyler below! I took my exam today, and when I was almost done, over 2 hours in, the proctor closed and terminated my exam because she said I moved my head and touched my hair!! This is so outrageous. I studied so much, and was close to submitting the exam! Two hours on the phone with customer service and all I got was a very noncommittal and nonchalant claim that someone would contact me within a few days with next steps. I absolutely was not looking at anything in the room other than my laptop! I probably did touch my hair - so what?!? DO NOT take an exam proctored by this terrible company!!