Had exam day CBT computer issues, but CFA Institute not helping

Question

I recently wrote the CBT. With a few minutes left on my exam the software wouldn't let me type/click anything. I signaled to the proctor and was trying to fix it. But by that point the counter went to zero and the exam finished. Prometric sent a complaint/ticket to CFAI.

I also contacted CFAI Customer Service to explain what happened. This got escalated(?) to another CFAI team and they're giving me the "Sorry we can't do anything because it has to be fair for everybody...".  They won't even acknowledge that Prometric sent them the complaint ticket.

Is there anything else that I can do? 
What options do candidates have when the issue was verified by Prometric and proctor?

I appreciate CFAI making the quick change to CBT, keeping the curriculum the same, and not raising fees because of the pandemic. I can see how they want to be fair to everybody. For all they know I could be lying and fabricating this all. But this isn't the case and Prometric confirmed my issue. How would this be fair to the candidate if (s)he had less time to write the exam?

I apologize if there's already a thread for this and can delete and repost to there if that helps.

mikey · Accepted Answer

Oh man, that sucks. Sorry to hear that happened to you.

In paper exams there wouldn't be such an issue, so I suspect CFA Institute may not have a robust process to deal with your specific situation yet. i.e. say they believe you - how should they resolve this? Do they put you back in the exam with a best-estimate X number of extra minutes to complete your exam? Do they award you the extra points for all uncompleted questions? Or not count the uncompleted questions? It's hard to say which works the best.

It's weird that CFA Institute are ignoring Prometric's verification of what happened though. I'd press them on this. If you have a Twitter / Instagram account, DMing them or calling them out on this might work 🤷‍♂️

zimbo2021 · Answer

I had similar exam-day struggles. Had to wait outside the exam room for 4 hours while they tried to solve a 'software bug'. During this time we weren't allowed food or water or access to our notes. Then then told us they couldn't fix the bug but we could take the test anyway - our only other option would be to just skip the exam, which didn't seem tenable.

The software flaw was that all questions appeared as pop-ups so that we had to constantly be clicking in and out of questions to see the passage and vice versa. Each time we clicked out of the question it would return us to the top of the passage, so we had to scroll back down and find our place. Not game-breaking but it definitely took extra time, which the proctors admitted.

And finally the exam ended at 2:12 hours each section instead of 2:15, which is the time listed in one section of the CFAI website and given on the practice exams. (I posted about this separately).

Those three factors combined to a pretty bad exam-day experience. Test center also filed a report about what wrong. I wrote CFA Institute about it and heard nothing.

I understand that the testing standards need to be maintained but there are other things they can offer - for example how about a refund on the test fee? Sad to not even get a response after they make you put so much time into preparing for these exams.

janster · Answer

That's horrible ShortTheShorts. I'm sorry to hear about that. I guess I should be lucky that they at least acknowledged my concerns.  I don't have any updates from them.  I hesitate to post something on social media because a paranoid part of me fears retribution since they're so secretive about the pass/fail process.