2 Questions regarding MCA

[Jen Hegna]

Is anyone having performance issues with the ADMIN side of Online MCA testing?  Our XP clients have been working very well - its just managing the test sessions that has been incredibly slow!

Also has anyone successfully gotten the MCAs to work on Win 7? We have had quite a few problems with that as well.

Jen

[Bryan Berg]

We had issues with Admin side of MCA testing last Spring, but it was only for one session, and the next day Pearson had an email that described some issues they were working on.

GRAD testing recently here in October sounded like it went well with no reports from our Curriculum Coordinator or Proctor that anything went slowly.

We've tried NWEA testing on Win7 without any problems, but haven't tried TestNav with them yet. What sort or problems did you run into?

[Brian Bartley]

We did GRAd retesting here on the 8th of October and the Admin side was horrible. We couldn't get the Proctor caching to work properly, had to reboot teh Proctor Caching server before starting the test, kept getting kicked out of the Admin site and finally could not login at all for several hours. All of the XP clients were working fine, it was the Admin side that sucked.

[Aaron Bergstralh]

I have assisted Goodhue in doing their MCAs on Windows 7. They completed all of their spring testing, summer sessions, and makeup sessions this fall without any major incidents.

I created a virtual server dedicated to testing that their coordinator logs into to handle proctor caching and test administration. This ensures that everything is always setup so that their testing coordinator can just log in and administer the test without bugging anyone. On the client side it was mainly just setting up the firewall rules and drive mappings in group policy.

[Jeff Kienitz]

I did notice a concern earlier this week with the admin side. When downloading tests to the proxy server, it was very slow and hung on a few items. I called pearson and they were able to fix the few test items that was holding up the proxy download. I have done a few things that have helped. I bought some real cheap servers and placed them next to the switch that also contains the lab machines. In this way the proxy server is on the same switch as the computers trying to access it. I just sit the box next tot eh switch without a keyboard, mouse or monitor and remote into it using remote desktop (mstsc). I also added both the new ports and ipaddresses for pearson in my firewall as trusted. They've added a couple recently. I use a DNS locator to find all the ip addresses for pearson similar to what we would use to block the dreaded facebook with proxies in our school.
Hope these tips help.

Jeff

[Jeff Kienitz]

As an extra tip, I remote a remote server from home about 6 in the morning and run the proxy downlaods. It beats the rush and if an issue occurs I can call tech support just as they come online. I can do it from home while I am gettig ready for work. I've learned that it saves on the last minute fraustrations.
I am using windows 7 for admin, but not for actual testing. Those workstations are xp.