Some time ago I came up with a pretty good formula for figuring out a court reporter’s hourly rate. It excludes appearance fees, but depending on the job, appearance fees can be pretty damn minimal and simply by adding a small amount to the hourly rate, you’d be adjusting for the lost appearance income.
Page rate * pages per hour = hourly rate.
Hourly rate * 0.33 = writing time rate
Hourly rate * 0.67 = transcription rate
Perhaps divide your appearance fee by 4 and add it to the hourly. This is a little more fair than the 4-hour blocks many in the industry use today.
From my experience, believe it or not, you can get a New York City deposition reporter for somewhere around $4.00 a page. And a court reporter gets somewhere between 40 and 60 pages per hour.
That gives us a range for a non-realtime reporter of $160 to $240 an hour. Seems high, but for every hour on the machine it can take up to 2 hours of transcription, and court reporters that can do it much faster are either cutting corners, really experienced, or really, really good.
According to my sources, digital court reporters make around $30. Just so everyone knows, a fraud nonprofit called the Speech-to-Text Institute was used by the larger corporations of the court reporting field to systematically soak the market in misinformation, confusing jobseekers and consumers. The aim was to expand digital court reporting, increase the supply of “court reporters” to create a market glut, and make corporations like Veritext look good on paper so they could be sold to the next sucker.
30/240 = 12.5%
And let me be clear, $4.00 per page is not exactly a rich life in court reporting NYC. There are many that make more than that, which means digital is an even smaller percentage.
Did your deposition discovery costs decrease 90%?
My sources say lawyer bills are higher than ever.
The secret is that charges that court reporters don’t share in are added to the bill while page rates are kept artificially low to keep you thinking you’re getting a great deal.
Do what you will with that information. Might I humbly suggest that if they’re going to use a digital court reporter, you demand that the bill be something like 20% of what it usually is.
Or let them milk you, and by extension, your clients. That’s cool too.
Just let it happen. Trust me.
With stenographer jobs being systematically eliminated via fraud and deceit rather than by actual technological advancement, there’s really no reason for us not to expose what the companies are doing. After all, if they’re successful enough in reducing stenographic court reporter numbers, courts won’t be able to fill spots, and my job will likely be eliminated someday too, and with the disabilities I live with, I’m unsure about being able to do better than what I’ve got. Call me biased, sure. But your whole system of law is based off of two biased sides presenting their evidence, so if bias is a reason to disregard truth, you can just throw out the whole justice system today if you want to paint biased people as untrustworthy.
Just writing that for a fan of mine.
Side note, corporations that make millions of dollars let a respected 14-year member of our field publish openly about their fraud for almost 3 years now. They’re banking on you doing nothing. I suppose I am too.
It occurs to me it might be best to come out and say that in terms of rates lawyers have a financial interest in prolonging this digital v steno thing. More suppliers in the market, more competition. This is juxtaposed against what the corporate schemers want, continued corporate consolidation of the field under people that can jack up prices a la tacit parallelism.
Lots of pressure for you to switch to digital. Now you know why. Do with it what you will.
So as I sat there over the years documenting things posted online and representations made by the larger corporations in my field, I was creating a record of what was happening that I could testify about it if it ever became an issue.
So here we are. Statute of limitations in New York defamation law has pretty much lapsed. Meaning that a 14-year “veteran” of the court reporting field came out publicly in his own name and said the largest corporation in court reporting was committing a fraud, and the corporations I wrote about let it happen despite it arguably being defamation per se if it wasn’t true. I presume because they bank on the intense stigma and assumed lack of credibility of someone with admitted illnesses/disabilities like mine.
Engaging in a scheme constituting a systematic course of conduct. Okay. What’s more systematic than a bunch of corporations getting together under a nonprofit to spread misinformation about the field? What about the representations made to attorneys that stenographers can’t be found when in fact corporations involved in the STTI Bloc were not really looking for stenographers? Effectively tricking consumers and jobseekers for years. A trick so effective it continues to this day.
“To defraud more than one person.” Well, there are a lot of consumers of Veritext and other fraudster services. Maybe if we asked a few if they were told stenographers could not be provided, we’d have that part down.
To obtain property from more than one person blah blah blah. Money is property. By taking people’s money, telling them the service they want is unavailable, and providing a subpar service for similar prices — it’s pretty much taking property by false or fraudulent pretenses. Maybe they’d take their business somewhere else if they knew the truth of “we want to cut our expenses and keep yours high.” That’s if it’s even true that digital is cheaper and not just an assumption by the finance gurus.
Penal Law 20.25 in New York provides for the criminal liability of people that commit criminal acts on behalf of corporations. So theoretically, if the persons that ordered this stuff were identified, they could go to jail for up to a year.
So yeah… look, I get that an A misdemeanor is not the crime of the century. But isn’t it at least a little interesting and newsworthy that the shortage that many court reporters and journalists have written about at length is actually a crime being committed?
I’m speaking up because, as I’ve documented before, when the women of this profession speak up, they’re sometimes threatened with a defamation lawsuit. Because anyone can sue anyone for any reason, this scares them into silence. I have pro se experiences, so I could probably defend myself in a bogus lawsuit. But you know what? There are still brave people speaking out like the Protect Your Record Project and Jackie Mentecky. So even if you buy wholeheartedly that I’m an idiot, invalid, or just untrustworthy, I’m not alone in my general message. You have to really look away from the evidence in order to not see it.
And this was all done in a strategic way by me. If the corporations respond to my antics, they give us more information, and information is what helped this come to light in the first place. Information is good.
If the corporations do not respond, they are silenced while I am free to build support and fundraise, as well as rewrite the narrative. This is what I’ve done for a few years now, and it’s working, albeit slower than anyone would’ve liked.
If the corporations respond with a bogus lawsuit, I get more information than I ever would’ve been able to through the discovery process and blow this up Streisand Effect style. They’ll also burn a whole lot of money on something I have an affirmative defense to. I got a buddy whose court case on a trip and fall has dragged out over 6 years. My blog would take hundreds of hours to sort through. We’d be in court forever. Game, set, match. The broken system can be used to our advantage.
And every day that goes by, the strength of a bogus lawsuit gets weaker. There are a number of things in case law that point to the inadmissibility of a case that the plaintiff sits on.
And that’s pretty much it.
The more people that echo my claims and point to my work, the less ignorable it is, and the more people we reach.
P.S.
For one of the first times ever, I took down a blog post. The one I took down shall not be named.
But I pose a question to you, readers.
If you wrote something that hurt someone that you never intended to hurt, what would you do?
Does it matter what their relationship to you is? What if it was a stranger?
These are the kinds of choices my writing has brought me. Things I decide in silence and isolation. Things I rarely share.
I can’t help but wonder what the world would think if it could experience these moments in time with me.
Perhaps that’s why I write at all. Captured moments in time that others can experience with me.
An art that court reporters know well.
But is it dying or evolving?
It brings back memories of a night I got punched in the mouth.
If I could de-escalate that, certainly there are a great many things I can convince people of.
I would like to convince you that you will triumph.
That you are special.
And that if there is a way to heal a hurt soul, we should.
Stenonymous publishes allegations that have not yet been verified for the purpose of connecting court reporters who may be affected. Pass it on if you know someone impacted.
And, of course, if something here is false, Stenonymous is open to receiving more information. I almost never censor comments. That’s why it was such a shock to me that nobody from any major corporation ever submitted a rebuttal to my court reporter shortage fraud work.
But I digress…
Contact Michel DM on Facebook for more information.
*This is a creative writing exercise meant to make the reader think. While it will talk about real world things, it does so in a way that is meant to be funny-ish, dark humor.One of my readers mentioned these joke posts can be unpleasant because the reveal comes at the end. We’re going to try doing it at the beginning now.**
AI has been used as a buzzword to milk investors for years now. It’s only natural that the tiny court reporting industry follow suit. After all, AI has never killed anyone or gotten them raped in jail. What could go wrong when we’re dealing with the accuracy of court records and the strength of meritorious appeals? After all, all trials result in a perfect verdict all the time. The system never goofs.
Look at how AI improved medical transcription. It made sure your doctor’s eyes are on that transcription during your appointment. What? You want them to examine YOU? Quality care is not part of the Leonard Green model of looting hospitals for poor people. Similarly, Leonard Green asset, Veritext, continues its push to lower quality wherever profitable.
From 95% in 2016 to 25% in 2020, technology is exponential, so there’s nothing you can do, just give us your jobs. Actually, no, just come work for us for less. Digital reporting is the future. You can just take less money to clean up our ASR. And that’s progress because then your money is in our wallet.
Look, even if you think there may be some quality issues with the AI stuff, it’s inevitable. These folks have more money than us. There’s definitely no world where court reporters make so much noise about digital reporting that the cost of advertising for digitals outweighs the cost of not being a scheming dickhead. No, that could never happen.
Give up and do nothing. That is the way of the “virtuous person.”
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
**So that whole private equity thing where the companies buy, hold, and sell other companies,it’s a cool way to make money. But as it turns out, my blog has been increasing investor knowledge too. Big box might not be able to sucker another firm into buying their company. This might become one of so many leads that turns into a big nothing burger, but stay tuned.
Just like I posted on social media yesterday, I’m starting to like Steno Imperium’s alarmist style. It’s similar to my own in that it says what needs to be said in a way that is, in my view, very alternative to our mainstream culture and, in its own way, artistic. Even though the new age is one of instant gratification and short-form content, the writer takes the time to dive deep into the message. The value of that can’t go unsung.
I’m still in the process of processing it all, but among the most surprising claims is that the starting point of 60,000 court reporters used by many organizations is false or that there is no evidence of it.
Steno Imperium: The Court Reporter 1993 Census doesn’t exist — this graphic makes the drop look much more dramatic than it would factually be.
Well, I’m not going to take too much thunder from my fellow writer. Go check out some of the information and infographics. If anyone can get their hands on a copy of this alleged 1993 document, please send it over to contact@stenonymous.com or comment below. Crowdsourcing information has done well for us so far. I don’t think we should stop now.
And thank you, Steno Imperium. In my wildest dreams, I never could’ve imagined that original 60,000 number I’ve seen floating around could be made up. Maybe that’s always been my problem, too gullible and trusting.
My favorite quote? “Once you’ve got missing or incomplete transcripts, you might as well kiss your appeal goodbye.”
I’ve been on the consumer awareness game for a long time. But I realize my site’s hard to navigate for some. I’ll just put this on the front page. Hopefully it sums it up nicely.
The first game is that while companies grind down on the page rates — the primary income of the court reporter you’re working with — they come up with fees that most of us wouldn’t dream of charging. This has the effect of making what you’re actually paying more than what you would with a small business or sole proprietor while making it look like you’re getting a lower “price per unit.”
The second game is that they’ll send bills with no itemization so that you don’t even know what you’re paying for and have to interact with them to get it. This is a frustrating experience, so some of you will just pay it.
The third game is that they lie and bait and switch you, sending digital court reporters when you order stenographers and telling you stenographers aren’t available while telling stenographers their rates are too high or there’s not enough work. The nonprofit Protect Your Record Project was formed, in part, to educate about this one.
But to understand all this, you previously had to navigate my site and find articles like the ones I’m about to link. Now you can just read this. Hooray.
While court reporters in New York City are working for anything from $3.25 to $4.50 a page, here’s what’s happening around the country:
Basically the trust you have in us as guardians of the record and our whole “ethics culture” has been abused by some in the community taking you all for suckers.
And if you should happen to come across things on this site that make you question my mental state or personality, just remember that a large portion of it is a performative media style where I use propaganda techniques to tell the truth and educate people on those same techniques. I chose that because I detected that propaganda techniques and the Empty City Strategy were being used to bamboozle the women of court reporting and their clients — you. I did most of the zany stuff because it runs in stark contrast to the cottage industry of court reporting, where everything was (is?) molded to be our own mini-distortion of your ostensibly more conservative and “slow-to-change” legal world.
I played my part. It got people talking.
Now all of you have a choice. Share this with your fellow attorneys and play a part in shaping a more ethical world, or close me out and forget we had this moment together.
Just know that whatever you choose, I wish you the best.
KRORPS K- SHAEUR TAO FPLT
Addendum:
A reader felt my use of “women of court reporting” was cringe because there are many men in the field. This is true. No offense meant to anybody. I used the term because we’re 88% women and I thought some of my readers would appreciate it. If that’s not the case, I’m quite happy to not use it again.
On Thursday the Onondaga Criminal Court arraignments had a surprise visit from the embattled z-list court reporting personality, X, formerly known as George Santos. Santos, having been charged with being too compliant with police officers, was discovered to be a stenographer just shortly into the proceeding.
Stenonymous publishes “real” court transcript for creative writing exercise.
After the reveal, Mr. Santos was asked by the Court to relieve the official court reporter taking the proceedings. Mr. Santos allegedly turned to her, smiled, and said, “don’t worry, I got this. I’m the NCRA Fastest Fingers Award Winner of 2023. Elon Musk is going to buy you a horse for your trouble.”
Once Santos was behind the keys of the stenotype, the rest of it went well for him. In the transcript obtained by Court Tee Vee, an unprecedented situation unfolded.
THE COURT: Well, Mr. Santos, it seems there’s been a mistake. Your lawyer, Mr. Richards, has pointed out that the accusatory instrument has a fatal defect. The case is dismissed and sealed.
THE PROSECUTOR: Oh, Mr. Santos, we are so, so sorry for our malicious prosecution. Please don’t use the transcript of this proceeding to sue us.
MR. RICHARDS: My client is a benevolent and understanding person. In addition to being the first man to the moon and the only person to single handedly save an entire school bus of children with his left pinky, he donated enough to charity to end world hunger and eliminated unemployment worldwide. There’s no reason for him to sue you, and your apology is humbly accepted.
THE COURT: By the way, Mr. Santos, thank you for ending the court reporter shortage fraud by creating a controversy so obnoxious that there isn’t a single person that hasn’t heard of stenography. That was a bold move, and it really paid off for your profession, they should be proud.
THE DEFENDANT: Your Honor, it was no trouble. The court reporters living here and working every day to make this county shine, they’re the real heroes.
(Whereupon, court officers and court clerks all broke into tears as the sun shone through an open window and a beam of light cast a spotlight on X, formerly known as George Santos. As he exited the courtroom, a flock of doves carrying the mice from Cinderella fluttered through the window and dropped their furry friends, and everyone left the courtroom while singing We All Lift Together from the worldwide critically acclaimed MMORPG Warframe. Yes, including the mice and doves.)
Critics question the parenthetical at the end. Court officers, known for their professionalism, helpfulness, and dedication to the safety of courthouses, and clerks, also known for their professionalism and dedication to the just and fair operation of courthouses, simply don’t do that kind of thing. A source speaking on the condition of anonymity stated that in reality, the relieved stenographer was actually 1,567% more qualified than Santos, so we’re not really sure what occurred that day.
Breaking news. Check back for more updates.
*None of this is real. It’s part of Stenonymous Whatever I Want Weekends, a thing I just made up for when I want to do something different like this parody of so many flavors. According to a source that wishes to remain anonymous, in the incident this was based on, the erroneously-charged case was dismissed and sealed 14 days after arraignment. The source believes that a small percentage of our field does not understand the gravity of our work and how it can impact people’s lives, and that by making this excerpt and attached writing exercise public, we can all be reminded that anyone can be charged with anything, and that treating all lawyers, litigants, and the public equally is imperative. “It could be any of us one day,” he said.
Thanks again, Anonymous. I share these beliefs, but even if I didn’t, I’d probably have published anyway for the literary and conceptual value.
From Anonymous and myself, thank you for making this profession shine every day with your hard work and dedication.
This is a timeline of events I wrote out for another project. It presents a snapshot of what I have documented over the years and links many blog posts to form what I feel is the bulk of the story.
Perhaps it will help supporters to have a single document like this. Perhaps it’ll help those who get lost trying to navigate the site and understand the issues. Perhaps it’ll sit on the internet collecting internet dust. Whatever the case, just know that I appreciate every single one of you for spreading the word and sending me information. It has made all of this possible.
Summary of Fraud:
The basic idea is that these multimillion dollar corps (Veritext, US Legal, etc) got together under the nonprofit Speech-to-Text Institute to claim the stenographer shortage was impossible to solve and artificially increase digital demand, which they all then benefit from. Stenograph was also a part of STTI, as its president, Anir Dutta, was vice president of the STTI. While making these claims through STTI, many of the companies were representing to attorneys and the public that they couldn’t find stenographers. Meanwhile, they weren’t using basic methods to find stenographers, like Sourcebook / PRO Link, a national directory of stenographers. Jim Cudahy is instrumental in getting the shortage forecasted via NCRA, then he turns around and weaponizes it against us years later before I declare him a fraud and he runs off to another association about a year before the STTI gets sued and takes down its site.
Timeline of Documentation:
2013 – The Court Reporting Industry Outlook 2013-2014 is created by Ducker Worldwide for the National Court Reporters Association. Jim Cudahy is Executive Director of NCRA at this point and instrumental in getting the shortage forecasted. Notably, California’s shortage is forecasted to be 5x to 20x worse than any other state.
2014-2018 – Initiatives such as NCRA A to Z, Project Steno, and Open Steno boost stenographic recruitment and public awareness of steno. Jim Cudahy is replaced as Executive Director during this time period and goes on to do whatever he does (7 MARCOM, I think). All of the companies in question were incredibly quiet, considering there was allegedly an impending shortage of doom.
2018 – At this point, the field didn’t even believe the larger companies were using digital court reporting. I know this because it surprised people when I published about it. Around this time, companies also began advertising huge bonuses with jobs to get court reporters to cover in California, lending some credibility to shortage concerns.
2019 – Veritext begins propagandizing lawyers to get them to change their deposition notices and allow for digital court reporting. US Legal Support buys and later kills StenoTrain, which was run by Patricia Falls (court reporting educator that is now all about digital.) At this point in history, companies were trying to get digital court reporters seen as just court reporters. We began differentiating ourselves as stenographers. Remote reporting comes up as a potential fix for shortage woes.
Veritext VP Gina Hardin writes a piece about digital reporting changing the landscape of reporting. After big social media buzz, she’s allegedly fired. Veritext makes it out like she did this of her own choice rather than following the direction of the company. Veritext makes the public statement that stenography is the life-blood of our industry and that of Veritext.
Companies begin popping up making outrageous claims. For example, vTestify had a calculator on its site that said it could save attorneys $3,000 per deposition.
Stenographers are often insulted as “expensive,” but in 2019 I learned we were working for rates 30 years behind inflation. (NY)
Jim Cudahy reappears under the Speech-to-Text Institute making the claim that the stenographer shortage is impossible to solve.
At this point, the bait and switch tactics of sending digital court reporters instead of stenographers are known. A nonprofit called Protect Your Record Project is formed to warn consumers.
Open letter released from Veritext about the shortage.
2021 – Veritext makes a statement to Stenonymous that technology will not take the place of the reporter. I begin to realize the Ducker Report was flawed. I get my hands on an email from US Legal Rep Peter Giammanco where he puts IN WRITING “does it really matter if done legally and ethically…[if both products are the same.]” I document some of the materials that companies are using to promote digital and note the scarcity of pro-stenographer material. I note that BLS statistics appear inaccurate and don’t match up with NCRA’s statistics. STTI, U.S. Legal, and Veritext all use a flimsy game of numbers to continue to push the propaganda the shortage is impossible to solve.
At this point the switch is flipped and I start poking holes in STTI materials.
A website using stenography images to lure people into digital court reporting is found. When I alert ESYOH to the fraud, they take parts of it down.
BlueLedge Digital Court Reporter training is linked to Veritext – the full extent of the relationship is unknown. And Stenograph is definitely in on making money off of digital court reporting and part of STTI. Interestingly, a Veritext company appeared to share an office with BlueLedge. Stenograph’s stenographer support also took a massive dip during this time period. Even NCRA notes there may be illegal conduct coming from digital land.
It’s also noted that Veritext ran a training for NYPTI prosecutors (prosecutors often go into civil lit, Veritext’s domain). They made it seem like stenography was old and outdated despite modern computerization. Basically eliminating us in attorneys’ minds through education.
At this point in history, I declared Jim Cudahy a fraud for his part in advancing STTI’s agenda.
2023 – Veritext subsidiary is discovered to have purged popular stenographer anecdote. Indiana proposes a ban on stenography in its courts. A lawsuit emerges claiming USL stole commissionable income from one of its executives, in my view strengthening the case that they’d commit illegal acts. Veritext goes after a court reporter for something they wrote on Facebook after ignoring my claims for over a year (well beyond the statute of limitations for defamation at this point.)
A lawsuit is filed against the Speech-to-Text Institute for anticompetitive behavior and the STTI takes its site off the web.
[REDACTED] calls me [REDACTED], and when this is discovered, he apologizes. The situation causes an uproar in its customer base that results in a Town Hall Meeting with customers where Mr. Dutta stated he was no longer affiliated with the STTI organization.
That’s the story so far. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. But I beg you to look at the inertia of the companies for half a decade prior to the shortage compared to their aggressive expansion of digital thereafter, as well as the flip flopping by Veritext that points to a very real intent to deceive.
2. Correction to the original article which accidentally said Jim Cudahy changed associations months before STTI took down its site. In fact it was more like a year. This confusion was a 2022/2023 typo in my notes.
As of August 2023:
I scraped the old STTI leadership off the Wayback Machine so that people can see what I’m saying when I talk about the STTI Bloc or the companies behind the organization.
Then leadership of the Speech-to-Text Institute, as preserved by Stenonymous.com and the Wayback MachineThen leadership of the Speech-to-Text Institute, as preserved by Stenonymous.com and the Wayback MachineThen leadership of the Speech-to-Text Institute, as preserved by Stenonymous.com and the Wayback Machine
I am now uploading the art that’s been used to communicate our position.
I’m starting to think that the reason this hasn’t been picked up by the ALM brands or Law360 is because ALM is big business’s bitch and Law360 is a B2B scam that doesn’t have any interest in actually informing people. Smaller news shops probably figure “eh, the legal news world hasn’t picked this up, so it must be fake.” Nope. Here it is. Christopher Day, court reporter extraordinaire, has been accusing the largest court reporting provider of fraud for years. It’s the industry’s biggest open secret. And it’s only secret because American media is a corporate consolidated hellhole that will readily mislead the public for a dime.
This shit really happens, bro. Same way the media cut the news about the pilot studies in Testifying While Black.
In an email received at about 3:11 p.m. today, Stenograph announced the date of its town hall meeting and distributed an invite link. Participants are asked to send their questions to townhall23@stenograph.com by May 30, 2023.
There are some problems with the way this is being done. First, Stenograph being in control of the questions means that some questions may be disregarded. If you send in questions, consider saving evidence that you sent them and then letting me know if any of your questions were ignored afterwards. We can at least create a record of what wasn’t asked if my paranoia over Stenograph’s control of the event turns out to be healthy skepticism. Overlapping with that concern, there are questions about whether any live questions will be taken or whether the town hall will be exclusively limited to questions sent to the email provided by May 30. I have to admit, I believe that Stenograph should take some questions beforehand because it’s a company and it’s hard to answer questions on the fly about a company with no prep as to what those questions will be. But I also believe a healthy town hall would have some live question component.
Another problem that arises is that at 6 pm EST, it’s 3 PM PST. Many stenographers will be working at the time of the event, and if it is not recorded and distributed, they will miss it. Participants could record themselves using Open Broadcast Software or their phones or whatever, but it’s an extra step many won’t take. And again, paranoia strikes. What if low attendance is used to support the shortage narrative pushed by Stenograph, Veritext, US Legal Support, and the Speech-to-Text Institute? In my heart, I hope the company wouldn’t do that, but I’ve learned to stop thinking with my heart and understand that people play games.
If there are questions you want to ask that you don’t feel comfortable sending to Stenograph yourself, please comment them here. I will send them and keep a record of what I send. I will not send anything overtly inappropriate.
I’ve said many times before that if Stenograph admits that the Speech-to-Text Institute was wrong about the stenographer shortage being impossible to solve, it will make court reporting history. That’s what I’ll be looking out for. I have other questions about the percentage of revenue that goes into their R&D budget and what percentage of that is specifically spent on stenographic technology, but other than that, I haven’t yet decided what to ask.
For what it’s worth, if anybody from Stenograph is reading, thanks for doing this, but these are honest concerns court reporters have.
Court reporters, if you fight, you will win. You wanted a town hall and you got one. Make the most of it and remember this moment the next time someone tells you something cannot be done.
Addendum:
I messed up the times in the original post. It’s 6 PM EST, 3 PM PST. May 31, 2023.
While scouring social media, I came across an interesting post by Nancy Silberger. It mentioned the Better Business Bureau reviews for ProctorU.
“Last night, something compelled me to Google ‘ProctorU Reviews,’ which brought me to the BBB website. OMG, I went back over 2 years of reviews (2021-May 2023) and there was not ONE SINGLE positive review. Every time someone made a complaint about their testing experience ProctorU responded with a curt ‘it’s your fault’ type of response. Positively sickening that RTC still uses this platform. There has to be a bazillion other proctoring services out there. NCRA, RTC, WAKE UP AND LOSE THIS PLATFORM!!!” – Nancy Silberger
This is not entirely surprising. I think most people only complain to BBB when they feel mistreated by business. But some of the complaints were striking. I know the only time I used the BBB was when Naegeli threatened me. It wasn’t helpful, but it does create a record.
Anyway, people came forward to discuss their feelings and ideas regarding testing and ProctorU.
“Every single thing about how NCRA certifies professionals needs to be revamped. From the test itself reflecting how we actually do our job to professional evaluation of feasible test content and procedure to RTC and ProctorU. We’re screaming that we need to get people out there. We recruit, they go all the way through school, and they can’t get over the finish line leading some to leave the field after that long journey. We’re sure loud and quick enough to pull them in with A to Z, but COMPLETELY dead on the testing disaster.” -Dineen Squillante
What Dineen had to say really resonated with me. I personally believe AudioSync has massively deteriorated the interrupting skills of court reporters. But at this point, we have to contend with the reality that it is widely used on the job and using it effectively is part of the job for most court reporters and scopists. Even limited use would probably upgrade our pass rate significantly.
Just for the sake of completeness, I glanced over the BBB reviews too. Better Business Bureau isn’t infallible, but It’s pretty horrifying stuff for tests far less technical than ours.
“This is a scam…” -ProctorU review on Better Business Bureau.
As I was preparing for this post, a reader sent me an old Speech-to-Text Institute article with Marybeth Everhart, Realtime Coach. With hindsight, I can say that this supports the assertion that we need change. The ProctorU problems aside for a moment, I’ve been looked down on at times because I won’t refer to digitals as button pushers or recorders. Well, someone from the platform we use for our testing was pretty openly digital friendly.
Excerpt from Speech-to-Text Institute materials.Excerpt from Speech-to-Text Institute materials demonstrating the 11,000 shortage number again.Excerpt from the Speech-to-Text Institute materials.
And, unfortunately, as we later learned, the Speech-to-Text Institute is a propaganda outfit and corporate construct meant to manipulate the court reporting & stenotype services market. So, not to say that RTC is guilty of the same fraud I’ve alleged against Veritext et al, but for a field that used to care very much about bias or the appearance of bias, it does feel like all the major players, including ones we rely on for passing our students, are pretty biased in favor of expanding digital reporting, a position that is kind of strange to have if stenography is the gold standard and we haven’t tried other methods of alleviating the shortage, like asking lawyers to schedule with us in advance instead of the day before.
Even worse, digital proponents attack our testing procedures from the other direction, with Stenograph President Anir Dutta having stated in a letter, “…the national and state recognized process to certify a machine shorthand professional is unnecessarily arduous and, in our informed assessment, is designed to keep the number of stenographers entering the market artificially low.” I missed that line when I first reported about it, but I do find it kind of funny that while I have basically accused the companies under the Speech-to-Text Institute umbrella of manipulating the market to increase the number of court reporters create a market glut, depressing reporter incomes, they turned around and alleged that someone designed the state and national testing process to artificially reduce the number of stenographers. Since the National Court Reporters Association is basically the national test process, I think it’s safe to assume what organization they’re throwing shade on here, and it makes me rethink Anir’s NCRA comments a little bit more than I was thinking about them after he apologized to me.
In the hopes of a better tomorrow, I’m amplifying this discussion. Perhaps our next step is to have a serious look into which online proctoring companies have the best reviews and consider asking NCRA to make the switch.
