You have registered a candidate on the BCS portal and that information is not showing under the view/edit section of the litmus administration portals’ candidates tab (under manage candidate).

Solution – You have not imported the candidate information from the BCS to the Litmus administration portal. – You need to wait up to two hours from registration to import.

• Under the candidate tab of the admin portal near the bottom of the left hand menu is a heading “BCS candidates”  

• Click on this heading and choose the most appropriate of the five options for importing the information. Most centres use option 1 “Get candidates by BCS ID” or option 3 “Get Multiple candidates by centre ID and Product Type”

• Enter & Select the appropriate information in the relevant fields.

• If a candidate is entered for both ECDL Essentials and Extra, their information will need to be imported twice. Once for each level.

• Qualification Specific ID’s for Essential begin with “UKE”.

• Qualification Specific ID’s for Extra begin with “UKX”.

• Qualification Specific ID’s for ECDL begin with “UK”.

To launch a new syllabus 5 test the candidate is asked for the Qualification specific ID. In the past the logbook number of BCS number was used however this will not work now.

Solution – When a candidate is registered on the BCS portal they are now assigned a qualification specific ID. Before a candidate logs into the live test session you can look this information up.

• Under the candidate tab of the Litmus admin portal at the bottom of the left hand menu is a “qualification specific ID” section.

• Select View and filter the information by any of the available fields.

• The qualification specific ID appears in the second column along.

• Ensure that each candidate has access to this reference before attempting to launch a live test session. OR

• Login to the BCS Test Centre Forum.

• Under “Manage candidates” select “report registered learners”

• Filter the information by the correct qualification.

• Select a start date and an end date.

• Save the file as an XML file on your desktop and then open with Excel.

• This will provide you with the qualification specific ID’s.

When the candidate logs in there is no live test available under the live test tab, but the test session has been set up.

Solution - The test session has not been set to “active”.

• An invigilator needs to log in to the admin portal and change the test session from the default status of “not started” to “active”.

• The test will then show up on the candidate side.

The candidate/administrator cannot log on.

Solution - You will need to check the login name and password.

• Check the username and password character by character.

• Remember that Litmus passwords need to contain special characters – a character that is not a letter or number e.g. !, $ or %. The password will always contain one of these special characters.

The test will not run and within the tool bar is the message “unable to display toolbar”.

Solution A – The support files have not been installed. The support files were updates in September 09, if you have not tested since then you will need to re-install these files on all machines.

• The support files can be found on both the admin and the candidate side of the web portal.  

• Select the “help” tab from the top right hand corner of the page.

• Install the files. (Also, please check the technical online checklist).

Solution B – You will need to check the ActiveX settings

• The ActiveX settings have not been amended OR

• ActiveX has not yet been installed.  

• Please see the ActiveX document on the help page (link below). ActiveX is a Microsoft plug in and can be found within internet explorer.

• http://www.microsoft.com/protect/computer/basics/activex.mspx

• (Also, please check the technical online check list)

The test does not run properly, or there seems to be some problem with the marking at the end of the test.

Solution – Always contact us as soon as this happens.

• Every test has a set of files that sit behind it on the pc that the test has been taken on.

• In most cases we will ask you to send over these files via email so that we can investigate.

• It is important that you know that if these files are deleted from the computer or the hard drive is reformatted then we cannot look into any queries.

If at any point errors appear on screen either take a screenshot (we use ScreenPrint 32) or make a note of the error numbers. Always ensure that the test has been setup for the correct version of Office (2003/2007).

When a candidate is asked to refer to the “help section” during a test this refers to the off line help section not the on line help section.

When a candidate is taking either an Access or an Excel test, Macros need to be set to Enabled rather than Disabled.