National Certification Exam Candidates

To Jennifer et al.

Please accept my apologies for all the confusion.

I confirmed that the official score reports were sent out from Prometric yesterday 4/29/19.  If you did not receive one please contact info@nbcsn.org .  Only by contacting the office can we check on your concerns.  This forum, while helpful, was not meant to be a substitute for contact with NBCSN through regular challenges.

I can give you an explanation of the recent difficulties, it does not change anyone's anxiety or frustration.  Because the original contact from a candidate stating they had passed the exam prior to the exam having gone through complete scoring came through this forum we have tried to keep members of this forum apprised of what is going on. NBCSN did send emails out to the 27 people who were impacted by having received a score report within 24 – 48 hours I believe.  I don't know why you would not have received it.

So here is the explanation. It is  long.

Between mid June and mid July NBCSN moved from one management company to another.  We also changed our application software vendor.  The new vendor had many options available to us, one of which was an automated congratulations email which would go out after NBCSN received the score report from Prometric. We thought that was a really nice idea.

Here is a list of cascading events that caused the current problems.  The spring test window was the first window that was impacted by this.:

• Prometric electronically sent NBCSN the fall score reports, but did not close the "switch" that sends out the reports;
• NBCSN sent out the fall congratulations letters manually and the software company configured the automation for the spring window;
• Once the automation was configured the letters were scheduled to go out once the score reports came in;
• As exams were taken each exam result  is posted as a Pass until the Problem Item Analysis (PIA)Call takes place to post-equate the exam;
• Because the "switch" had not been closed on the Prometric end, those exam results came through to NBCSN which triggered the automation;
• Since someone had posted on this forum that they had received their exam scores we were able to stop those automations at 27 test takers who took the exam between March 7 and 8;
• Our management company sent out emails explaining the situation to those 27 test takers notifying them to ignore the previous email they received;
• When we learned that the official scores would be sent out on 4/29, we asked the software company to set the automations up for Monday 4/29;
• Unfortunately, the erroneous report was still in the system and triggered the automation,
• This group actually included test takers from March 7-12, and another email was sent out from the management company.
• NBCSN, AH our management company, Prometric, and Heuristic Solutions, our software company are currently working to make sure nothing like this happens again.

While trying to provide great customer service, we have discovered that not everything works the way we hope it will, and unfortunately this group of test takers were caught in a landslide of problems.

We will work hard to regain your trust, and are working hard towards making this a less stressful process.  Applicants who passed the exam should be hearing from NBCSN within the next week.  We will be entering the score reports on our end and communications will come out to you.