There is a timer in the bottom right corner that counts down how much time is available for the L2P Exam.
I was taking my test, reviewing my answers and had 3:00 minutes displayed as being left on the clock. I then hit submit and was given a note at the top that said: “This exam has been scored as a 0% (incomplete) because the time has expired.”
When I scrolled down the page, my card boxes were blank with none of the questions nor answers being displayed. After closing out of the exam and reopening it, it then displayed everything properly with the correct answers highlighted but my answers were not saved at all.
As some backstory to my testing adventures, I had a test proctored to me last June that I had never opened. It did not have a displayed end date to take said test and was displayed in my exams list. I went to find the exam to take it last night but it was not displayed at all in my exams list. Checking my exams list afterwards for answers, I noticed that the exam that was proctored in June was not only no longer displayed, but there seemed to be no record on my side of it ever existing. Thinking that it must had lapsed last year some time, I went about creating an exam to take and had an error come up, saying that I was still in cooldown, even though it has been many months since I’ve taken an exam.
After talking to an RC, they told me that they could see the previous exam on their end and that it didn’t have a start/end date associated with it, leading them to believe that Apps was viewing it as pending, which didn’t allow me to create a new exam. I then had an exam created for me and went about taking it which is the one that had the issues that I reported above.
With this being said is there any chance that I may be able to somehow retrieve my answers and be correctly scored for the test since it had expired prematurely? If that is unable to be done, is there any way to have the same test administered again as I have my RC, David Hibb’s, approval to take the same test if at all possible? If neither of those things are available, how might I go about testing in such a way that this does not occur again in the future?
Thank you for your time and your assistance.
Sydney Townley
The timer is for 75 minutes, but you had the exam open for 132 minutes, according to the server logs. Are you sure that your computer’s time and timezone are set properly?
Does the timer tool not use my computer’s clock as a point of reference or is it attempting to use my location for the time?
Even if my clock is not correct for my timezone, if it’s going off of my computer’s clock, it should still be accurate for 75 minutes.
When we send you the exam, we also send the timestamp that the exam is due at, (unix timestamp, which uses UTC). As you take the exam, our Javascript code (which obviously you can see, since it’s included with the page) periodically calls (new Date()).getTime() to get the current time in the same format. That allows us to tell how much time is left before the exam is due. This works pretty well, since virtually every device nowadays is synced to a reliable network time source. Obviously if you change your computer’s time, we get the wrong information, and either auto-submit the exam early, or don’t auto-submit the exam until it’s too late, depending on which direction your clock is wrong in. To prevent gaming the system, the server also double-checks the time before accepting your answers, and it will refuse to accept answers if they’re more than a few minutes late. (I believe there’s 2 or 3 minutes of “slack” built in to account for reasonable clock errors or network latency.)
Moral of this story is that computers are getting really good at times and timezones, despite humanity’s best efforts to make them as complicated as possible. If you’re in a different timezone, change your computer’s timezone, not your computer’s time. That way your computer will have the correct local time as well as the correct UTC time and timezone. If you adjust the time but leave the incorrect timezone, then your computer will have the wrong timezone, and the wrong UTC time. You’ll have the correct local time (for certain interpretations of “correct” and “time”) only because the two errors balance out.
Ages ago I wrote some code that would throw a huge warning at the top of every page if your time is messed up in this way, but it’s been stuck in our code review process. I’ll be deploying that in the near future.