AAT experienced core infrastructure problems at the end of August, with systems issues impacting assessments for several days.
AAT told colleges it was working to establish the root cause and resolve the issues, and explained that its systems “are currently stable”.
AAT again apologised for any inconvenience this caused to students, and said students needed to submit an incident report so it can provide support and investigate the matter further.
Just as another academic year starts one worried tutor said many students are not convinced that the ongoing software problems are going to be resolved any time soon!
AAT’s Claire Bennison told PQ magazine that while incident reports concerning the assessment platform remained low in August, it is continuing to prioritise dealing with emerging issues, fixing remaining problems, improving customer response and student experiences.
She also explained AAT recently experienced some tech issues caused by AAT’s firewall and its data centres. These were fixed in less than three hours.
Bennison said: “We are investigating how to mitigate against these issues happening in future. We also released a system update on 4 September to resolve the outstanding issues with screen jumping and the highlighter tool, with further releases planned for the coming weeks to address any further unresolved problems.
“As the volume of assessments scheduled rapidly rises with the new academic year, we will continue to work closely with training providers to mitigate any problems and ensure everyone is well informed about preventing and dealing with technical issues. To support this, we have recently developed a new technical bulletin for training providers and assessment centres which is available as a downloadable PDF and contains a detailed troubleshooting guide.
“We have also improved our process for dealing with customer complaints and are now dealing with all platform-related complaints within five working days.
“We have made the decision to issue estimated results for any student who meet the requirements below:
1. Sat MATS between 1 Sep 22 – until further notice
2. Received a zero-mark score for Task 5 and/or Task 6.
“This estimated result is calculated using the actual student performance across tasks 1-4 with the full range of marks available to a student. This means that some students may still receive a “Not Yet Achieved” (NYA) result due to their performance on tasks 1-4.
“Our Special Consideration policy will be updated to reflect this change and be available from the week commencing 11 September 2023.”
