Hi all, posting here to share my experience with the tech issues in Writing. It look me 4 hours of back and forth with ProctorU and LSAC technicians to figure things out, but I finally finished it. I want to share my experience here so folks don't have to go through the same struggles. For context, I took it with my laptop closed, connected to an external monitor, and I used a webcam.
Once you click on "launch the test" from your LSAC page, you'll be directed to install ProctorU extension on Chrome, and then you'll do a pre-check via a ProctorU interface. During the last step, you'll be directed to the "exam lobby". Once you click on "start testing", you'll see the LSAC interface to start the test. Before you start the test, you'll be prompted another Proctor U interface to do a 360-camera pan of your room. Once you are done with that, you'll read the LSAC acknowledgement, and start the writing test.
My lessons learned:
Test your camera beforehand, make sure it can take a focused image of your ID: I had a cheap webcam that couldn't focus on my ID. My laptop integrated camera couldn't either. I first connected with a real proctor to check my ID. However, by the time we finished checking everything, the LSAC writing page had already expired. I ended up having to call LSAC to cancel my first launch, starting a new link, and then borrowing my friend's Logitech 920.
Pre-check: the program will not let you go back to earlier steps once you take your photo and ID photo. If your camera is weird during this process (I think mine was trying to use the laptop's integrated camera, which was closed) - please do not clear cache or refresh page during this pre-check. Call and connect with a technician, they'll take over the screen to help you.
Register for ProctorU beforehand: you can register with ProctorU beforehand, and once you log in, you can also do a system check to make sure things are good.
Best of luck everyone! Hope everyone has a smooth testing experience.
5 comments
Thanks for sharing your experience! It’s helpful to know I’m not the only one who’s been struggling. For whatever reason, my camera was detected but didn’t put forth an image, so I was unable to write the essay. What worked for me was using a webcam. I was still able to use my laptop
@Christine772 Totally! It was somehow confusing to navigate the process and I wish there were more information about it published
@HazelNi Defintely. Your post was the only thing I found that even gave me the idea to use a webcam. Thanks for posting! All the best on your exam!!
@Christine772 Thank you! Update tho - my writing got cancelled yesterday because somehow my webcam got disconnected during the test, I think it's because the proctorU extension tried to access my laptop camera mid-exam (which is closed), so I guess my updated advice is to use webcam with caution and make sure the webcam is set as the default camera :)
@HazelNi I'm sorry they cancelled your score! Hopefully using the webcam as the primary all the way will let you finally let you submit your argumentative writing portion.