Good morning!

This was the first year that the University of Wisconsin program administered the exam remotely. We started on on Saturday 11/4 at 8:00 am and the last trainee completed their exam at 5:15 pm. The feedback from the residents that took the test on 11/4 uniformly said that this was the worst texting experience of their lives. Every single resident had constant lag between questions. The initial work around was to close their browsers numerous times, clear the cache and reopen the exam (required taking a photo, providing ID and a system check). This was  a painfully slow process and the interruptions were very frustrating for the residents.

Later in the day coordinators/managers learned that residents could press F5 (PC) or Command +R (Mac) to refresh the testing browser to stop the lag. This improved the afternoon experience, but all residents still had to close the browser at least once during part two of the exam. I can’t imagine that the residents were able to provide peak test performance with such a suboptimal test delivery experience.

Below is a screenshot of the updates provided by AAOS and the testing vendor about the issue.

Going forward, I hope no other residents are subjected to such poor test delivery experiences. The OITE is stressful enough without these technical difficulties. Our main test date is next Saturday. I hope the experience is nothing like this weekend.

I hope the info will help all involved. Good luck!

Erica

The AAOS / OITE Team is most always featured at the ARCOS Conference (unless they cannot make it) and we do have them scheduled this year.

Please get up to the mic and ask them your questions in February!!!  They need to know your difficulties and that of your residents, as well.

I would also like to hear how everyone fares with the 2 proctor system.  The Board of Directors met with the OITE team in May and expressed concerns about this issue.

We will test in person this weekend, but as many of you are aware, there have been problems in the past!!

Stay Calm and Coordinate On!!

~Laurel

Hi Everyone,

I spoke to David Marshall at AAOS on Saturday because one of my residents was worried about losing time, frozen computer, no answer at tech support, etc and he was kind enough to return my call.

He was very apologetic about everything that has happened. I suggested that if they change processes from year to year, an email explaining that this year will be different from last, and what the differences will be, would be helpful. I also suggested they gather a small group of seasoned PCs prior to making any changes to discuss how those changes might impact all of us on our end-he admitted that there were just some aspects this year’s changes that they didn’t realize would impact us all so much-such as not being able to log into program workshop.

We’ll see what happens, but hopefully this week will go more smoothly than Saturday did.

Have a wonderful week!

Janet

Hello everyone!

I just wanted to send a quick update with some good news! 🙂

I have 2 residents taking the exam remotely today and so far there have been no issues.

Kim