A computer failure prevented the students from completing the practice exam. The administration claims to be able to repair it by June.
Par Thibaut Deleaz
© UGO PADOVANI / Hans Lucas via AFP
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« Uno fiasco! “ Sarah Daubresse, vice-president of the ANEMF, the association which represents the medical students, does not take off following the mock exam which turned into a nightmare for the future doctors. From this Monday March 13 to Wednesday 15, all sixth-year students, who must pass the national classifying tests (ECN) at the end of the year and choose their boarding school – and therefore their future specialization -, had to pass simultaneously training on the computer platform used for the competition. Except that nothing happened as planned, due to serial breakdowns.
READ ALSOWho wants to kill the hospital charts? “The site was rowing so much that you had to click six to seven times to validate the answers to the questions, breathes Marine*, a student in Lyon. And once more, me, it was fine; others next to me were downright disconnected from the platform. The Monday followingnoon event had many bugs, which were repeated on Tuesday morning. It was then announced to the students that the followingnoon test was canceled, and that of Wednesday advanced. They will never have their classification, “while it is [leur] only chance to know”, before the ECN of June, how they are located at the national level.
Changes to the platform in question
Added to the stress of preparing for these difficult and career-determining exams, this giant breakdown is especially worrying because it is the same platform that will be used in June for the final competition. “It’s very anxiety-provoking for the students, thunders Sarah Daubresse. At three months of the tests, they are told that it does not work! »
In recent years, however, the tool has worked smoothly. So what happened? It is the National Management Center (CNG), under the supervision of the Ministry of Health, which manages the examination platform. This year, the ECN events having evolved, it had to be adapted. A work carried out since the end of 2021, ensures the Point Philippe Touzy, head of the exercise authorization, competition and coaching department at the CNG. But, by touching “the heart of the reactor”, it destabilized the platform.
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The CNG, which “obviously regrets” these incidents, indicates that, if only 85% of students were able to complete the exam on Monday, the rate rose to 97% on Tuesday morning and 99% on Tuesday followingnoon, where the event was the only one identical to previous years. “It’s not a fiasco. Even if the conditions were not optimal, with slowdowns, many students were able to finish. “Philippe Touzy assures that” the main reasons for the anomalies have been identified, and that it is likely that a new test will be carried out over one day by the June ECNs”. Some universities have thus mentioned the deadline of “end of April-beginning of May”.
Not a white competition, but a technical test
“Students who have been able to complete the tests will have their grades”, confirms the CNG, but there will indeed be no national ranking. The administration also ensures that there was never any question of white competition, but of “test” competition. Clearly, the national training tests usually organized by universities, on a different platform from that of the final competition, have been replaced by a technical test of the CNG platform to verify the changes made to the system. But this was never made clear to the students.
“The worst thing, Marine gets annoyed, is that, on Monday morning, we were brought in for a load test of the platform… But we were just asked to connect, without asking a test question! Philippe Touzy confirms. Nothing out of the ordinary, he said. “The purpose of the load test is to see what happens once everyone is connected. But we don’t upload photos, we don’t send answers like during a test, so the servers aren’t as busy. And to promise that his teams are working hard to solve the problem. The students, they just have to cross their fingers that everything goes well in June.
*Name has been changed.
