MCAT Registration.... Arrgh

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Out of med school headdoc, out of med school 🙂

Anyway, wow, I'm still amazed that you have 32k posts, it must be from Forum Games like "Let's go through the alphabet 1,000,000 times, I'll go first: A".
 
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Just got through to one of their reps over the phone, and she said the system was down & to try again in 2-3 hours. I'm off to take a nap...hope I don't end up regretting this...
 
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mshheaddoc said:
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showpost.php?p=4547655&postcount=10
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I agree with Ellen's comments. This is a server load problem. As long as folks keep hitting "refresh", the problem will continue. The problem will go away when folks lay off the system for a while. If it takes six hours for it to return to normal, it's because it took folks six hours to get their heads around that.

Not excusing AAMC, btw. If they had competitors, everyone would switch brands by now...
 
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notdeadyet said:
I agree with Ellen's comments. This is a server load problem. As long as folks keep hitting "refresh", the problem will continue. The problem will go away when folks lay off the system for a while. If it takes six hours for it to return to normal, it's because it took folks six hours to get their heads around that.

Not excusing AAMC, btw. If they had competitors, everyone would switch brands by now...
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hahaha. damn monopolies...
 
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Has anyone managed to successfully reserve a seat? I've managed to get through to the Reserve Seat button or No Seats Available image, but no further. I've tried 4 centers so far and half said not seats were available and the others let me try to reserve a seat then say "The seat you have attempted to reserve is no longer available. Please try your search again."
 
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copa said:
If our IT guys reported to me,... :meanie:
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The servers pretty much tanked immediately and have been largely down/unable to handle traffic for three hours. Given that the number of users registering for the MCAT is a well established quantity, either the IT group _really_ doesn't know what they're doing or they were not given adequate resources to do the job properly.
 
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notdeadyet said:
The servers pretty much tanked immediately and have been largely down/unable to handle traffic for three hours. Given that the number of users registering for the MCAT is a well established quantity, either the IT group _really_ doesn't know what they're doing or they were not given adequate resources to do the job properly.
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This is the same problem that places like Ticketmaster get when it comes to handling volume when a very popular concert comes on for sale at 10am ET. You have to remember that over time, this is not the volume that AAMC will handle "all the time."

At least you didn't have this frustration while having final exams to study for two weeks ago.
 
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I swear I'm going to shoot this thing. I just want to register and get back to doing other things, but I've become needlessly obsessed.
 
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MasonPrehealth said:
This is the same problem that places like Ticketmaster get when it comes to handling volume when a very popular concert comes on for sale at 10am ET.
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Unless Ticketmaster has gotten really dumbed down since I used it last, they usually have a pretty good system set up. You have to try again and again until you get in ("sorry, try again soon"), but the system is not coming apart on you. Once you actually get in, the process is smooth.

MasonPrehealth said:
You have to remember that over time, this is not the volume that AAMC will handle "all the time."
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Yeah. Same with Amazon.com and Buy.com during the Christmas season. But they bulk up for the crunch and their systems work fine. The reason? They can't provide poor service and stay in business. AAMC can.

It's a pretty basic enrollment process for a number of users whose predictability would make any ebusiness manager absolutely drool.
 
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Are people being able to get through at all? 3.5 hours and still can't get past the Page Can't be Loaded Screen 🙁.
 
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notdeadyet said:
I agree with Ellen's comments. This is a server load problem. As long as folks keep hitting "refresh", the problem will continue. The problem will go away when folks lay off the system for a while. If it takes six hours for it to return to normal, it's because it took folks six hours to get their heads around that.

Not excusing AAMC, btw. If they had competitors, everyone would switch brands by now...
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Unfortunately Thomson Prometric doesn't register people for exams like this (so far as I know). At least AAMC does not have to go through an intermediary if they outsourced registration. Then we'd all be pretty miffed.

One day the MCAT will be available "year-around" like the DAT. But that's someday.
 
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notdeadyet said:
Yeah. Same with Amazon.com and Buy.com during the Christmas season. But they bulk up for the crunch and their systems work fine. The reason? They can't provide poor service and stay in business. AAMC can.

It's a pretty basic enrollment process for a number of users whose predictability would make any ebusiness manager absolutely drool.
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Not arguing against your points, but Amazon and Buy also have business operations continuously going on. They can monitor usage, and at least with a few years of past data, they can bulk up at the right time without sacrificing their service.

The other factor is that there is a limit for the number of seats here. Your local test site no longer accommodates hundreds of students or have ability to expand the number as easily as before. It is hard to predict the behavior pattern of people registering for the MCAT because now we have distributed the dates.

But I agree, anyone with an e-business IT background would probably do very well. I am not aware of any models or best practices that discussed how to handle such a load and what factors there are to effectively predict such a model... but then again, I don't specialize in this. Maybe I'd have to ask people who do emergency crisis management on what to do: imagine the surge of patients who might rush into your local ER when you're working there in the midst of some natural or manmade disaster (earthquake, bird flu)...
 
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Man, I got to Search by Location but no locations came up. Then the ever-present "Problem loading page..." screen.
 
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oh my goddd finally after almost 3.5 hrs i got to register paid and got my email confirmation 😀 good luck to all :luck:
 
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MasonPrehealth said:
Not arguing against your points, but Amazon and Buy also have business operations continuously going on. They can monitor usage, and at least with a few years of past data, they can bulk up at the right time without sacrificing their service.
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AAMC can do this a thousand times better. The number of students registering for the MCAT is a very finite number. If you look at number of enrollments over the past few years, it doesn't buck wildly. If they looked at how many people enrolled for the April exam last year and bulked to accommodate, they'd be fine. Amazon/Buy have a very tough job anticipating demand. AAMC does not.

MasonPrehealth said:
The other factor is that there is a limit for the number of seats here. Your local test site no longer accommodates hundreds of students or have ability to expand the number as easily as before. It is hard to predict the behavior pattern of people registering for the MCAT because now we have distributed the dates.
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The problem is a load issue. It can not handle the number of users trying to log on. Once on, they're crippling the system. Whether everyone is querying a database with a single date and a few large locations or a database with multiple dates and multiple smaller locations makes no difference to the database. The front end may have a pretty map and whatnot, but it's all just a query to the db.

I doubt very much that this is a distributed system writing in realtime to the test sites' enrollment databases. There would be no reason to have to do this kind of integration, since AAMC is the only one writing to it.

What AAMC is doing is very predictable and technically very simple. The only reason problems could arise is by underallocating resources, both human and material. Something like this is not hard to do, but would be very hard to do on the cheap.
 
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Is anyone having the problem of reaching the "Date/Test Site Availability" page but the calendar and map won't load? Is there any other way to select a site and date without using the graphics?

I'm so frustrated because I'm here but I can't search/select anything. The only thing I can do is refresh and hope the graphics load...
 
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