ProctorU Premium Fee Issues

[ctcarl]

Is anyone else experiencing problems with ProctorU premium fees?

For starters, I know that ProctorU is getting slammed, because online testing is the only game in town these days.  So testing windows are booking up quickly and some of the strange behavior I'm seeing, such as entire days of available time slots disappearing at once and so on, are probably a result of them being overwhelmed.

But the premium fee problem has me baffled.

Starting last week, every time I try to book a time slot, a $12.00 "Take it Now" fee appears in my cart.  Here's what the website says:

"The option for premium scheduling or rescheduling allows a user to take a live proctored exam within the next 2 to 72 hours. This option is available to most ProctorU users for an additional cost, called a premium fee. 

Please note: Depending on the institution or organization you are testing with, premium fees may not apply. Please contact your exam facilitator or instructor for more information regarding this policy.

Premium fees vary between two price brackets. If these fees are not covered by your institution, they will be as follows:

Scheduling or rescheduling your exam less than 72 hours in advance will incur an additional $5 - $8 premium scheduling fee on top of the regular exam fee.

Scheduling or rescheduling your exam less than 2 hours in advance will incur an additional $8 - $12 premium scheduling fee on top of the regular exam fee.

To avoid premiums, please be sure to schedule or reschedule any reservations more than 72 hours in advance."

Seems pretty straightforward.  Since everything I'm attempting to book is between 2 and 72 hours in advance, I should be charged $5-$8, which I learned is called a "Take it Soon" fee.  Every time I asked a chat rep about it, they would insist it was a proper charge, and they would pretend to not understand the difference between "Take it Soon" and "Take it Now".

I've send a support request but haven't heard back from them yet.  I'm curious to find out if everyone else is having this problem, or if it's just me.  Could I be misreading the explanation of the premium fees?  Or is ProctorU just capitalizing on the increase in volume by tacking on the "Take it Now" premiums instead of the lower "Take it Soon" fees and hoping no one will notice?

[bjcheung77]

I assume you're using this for Coopersmith courses, the Take It Now feature isn't new for Coopersmith, they have that for other course providers such as StraighterLine and it's not really a "take it now" kind of thing, they have to have available slots during that hour of the day you want to schedule the exam.

For StraighterLine, if you book the exam within 3 days, you have to pay the extra fee, when I was on StraighterLine, I practically booked my exams (almost all of them) exactly 3 days after I registered for each course, and if I didn't get to it, I can re-book using the same method.

As a suggestion, I would book it the same way, 3 days after or when you think you're about done with the review/study of their course materials. Otherwise, if you have some downtime, you can prepare yourself for Davar exams, these can be done with RPNow which is a recorded session of your exam, not a real time session.

[ctcarl]

That's right, BJ, these are for Coopersmith exams. I've used RPNow with Davar and vastly prefer it.

But this isn't a Coopersmith thing, its a ProctorU thing. The test-taker's institution can subsidize the fees if they want, but if they don't, the test-taker pays. I get that and have no problem with it.

I also get that you pay a small extra fee ($5-$8) for scheduling an exam less than 72 hours in advance.

And I understand that scheduling less than 2 hours in advance costs $8-$12. Makes sense to me.

The problem is, they're charging the $12 fee when scheduling more than 2 but less than 72 hours in advance.

FWIW, I did schedule my next exam four days in advance. It's just been hard to do that for the most part, since I've been waitng for textbooks and trying not to lose my momentum.