If I could give ZERO stars here, I would.
I am going to start this off by saying that I aced my exam here, so this has nothing to do with being bitter about a bad score.
Short story- save yourself a terrible experience that may even interfere with your ability to take your exam. For the full story, read on.
The instructions that I received via email stated, "plan to arrive at the test center at least 20 minutes before your scheduled testing time." For my 11 AM appointment, I arrived at 10:30 AM. As there was no mention of arriving too early, I felt that this was a very reasonable time to arrive. When I arrived, I found a glass door with a sign instructing me to knock lightly for entrance. I did so, waited a few minutes, then did so again. At one point, I saw someone inside close the door to a back room, so my knock had definitely been heard. After repeating this for 15 minutes, I began to get worried and called Kryterion using the number located in my instructional email. By the time I'd gotten through to someone at Kryterion, it was 10:50 AM and the proctor came to open the door for me. I informed the gentleman on the phone that someone had arrived to help me and the proctor rudely stated, "your instructions tell you to arrive 15 minutes before your scheduled time, but arriving early does not guarantee admission." Not only was she contradicting instructions, but her poor word choice made it sound like I possibly wouldn't be admitted at all. I was even more surprised by her approach to the situation when I realized that I was the only test taker in the facility. What reason could she have had to let my knock go completely unacknowledged for 20 minutes?
The proctor's lack of basic courtesy continued through my experience- but here comes the best (okay, worst) part. Upon entry she pointed to my cup of coffee and said, "I don't mind if you bring that in, just make sure it comes back out with you." I took this curt comment as meaning that she didn't want it littered in the facility. After my test, she instructed me to wait in the lobby area (no further instruction or estimate of time that I should expect to wait). I waited. I went to the restroom. As I continued to wait, I took my coffee cup from the desk (where I was instructed to leave it) and threw it in the trash- remembering that she did not want it left there. When the woman returned, her first words to me were, "where is your coffee cup?" I let her know that I'd thrown it away and without missing a beat she practically yelled, "I SPECIFICALLY told you that it needed to leave with you." I was floored by this response. I asked her, clearly not understanding the issue, if she wanted me to go get it out of the trash, and she said yes! After I retrieved my cup from the trash, she explained that she didn't want any food or drink in the trash in case it attracted bugs. Had she offered this explanation to begin with, while still strange, I would've known better than to throw my garbage in the garbage (silly me).
This situation is very disheartening to me for a few reasons. One, obviously no one deserves to be treated so terribly. Two, and most importantly, people are at this facility to take an exam. This is can be a high stress situation and the last thing that people need in that environment is the added stress of being treated so poorly. I am lucky to have been able to set that situation aside and focus on my exam (even despite the constant banging of weights from the CrossFit gym that shares a wall with the testing room), but many people would have found that added stress incredibly distracting and possibly even cause poor performance on their exam. Lastly, if Dov Educational Services has a pest problem, it should be addressed by a professional exterminator and/or nightly trash removal prior to offering services to the public. The way that their employees treat customers is completely unacceptable for any business. read more