Could ProctorU Be Bad News For You, Stenographers?

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.

NYSCRA Offering RPR WKT Test Prep September 2021

The National Court Reporters Association opened registration for written knowledge tests on September 1, 2021. In an effort to help reporters succeed, the New York State Court Reporters Association is holding several review sessions, each corresponding to a different part of the RPR WKT. On September 12, a technology and innovation review will be held. On September 19, an industry practices review will be held. On September 26, a professionalism and ethics review will be held. Registration links below!

September 12 – Technology and Innovation.
September 19 – Industry Practices
September 26 – Professionalism and Ethics

Alternatively, a registration link has been provided for all three.

I am going to be working on a much larger article about certification and my journey from believing certification was worthless to believing that it is necessary. But this can’t wait. In brief, certification is necessary because it forces us to engage with each other in the form of classes and CEUs. That engagement creates a community. That community helps us keep each other informed and avoid being taken advantage of. If you have any doubts about whether you should sign up for your WKT, just remember that the more you know, the more you can share with your fellow reporter, and the better all of us become. I have a feeling that NYSCRA’s illustrious current President, Joshua Edwards, and its indefatigable incoming President, Dominick Tursi, would agree with me on that one.

You can also sign up for NYSCRA’s voluntary RCR test pioneered by the founder of DALCO reporting, Debra Levinson, CSR-RMR-CRR-CRI-RCR. Read more below and register here!

Stenonymous Suite: Early Version

I wrote some time ago about how I wanted to combine all my steno-related computer coding into one thing so that I could troubleshoot one thing instead of keeping track of multiple projects. This early version of the Stenonymous Suite contains the WKT test generator, the finger drill generator, something I call a streamer, that streams the text you tell it to stream at the rate you tell it to stream, and it also automatically marks .txt files for dictation. As those of you who have manually marked dictation know, it can take upwards of 10 minutes per marking. This program will mark it in about one second, and has saved me over 15 hours of manually marking dictations.

If you are a stenographic educator or dictation enthusiast, this program is totally free and has no strings attached, but I am also willing to put it through the marker program for you at a rate of 25 cents per marking, $5 minimum.

Windows users, easy download exe here. Unzip the folder, click the StenonymousSuite.exe.

The code for the program is slapped up on here.

Practice, Finger Drill, WKT, Dictation Marker Update

I don’t have a lot of volunteers helping me test the things I put out, and I had inadvertently put out the wrong link to my three programs. I have updated the links at the top of all of these pages to go to a .zip download. You unzip the folder, double click the .exe inside, and it will run the program without installation. Note that most computers will pop up with something saying this program may harm your computer. The code to these programs is public, you can read it for yourself and ask your computer people, it will not harm your computer.

Transcript Marker – This will take a .txt transcript and mark it for speed. Note that it has been updated so that it will not count Q., A., COURT:, or WITNESS: as a word.

Finger Drill Generator – This program can create finger drills for you. You can also save and load custom lists of words. Note that if you share your saved lists with me, I can include them with future versions. Also note that you should not ask the generator to make files larger than 500 WPM for 300 minutes. That’s 150,000 words. It’s more than enough. I am cautioning you because if you tell it to do 1 million words for 1 million minutes, it’ll happily sit there and generate a text file that large, take a long time to do that, and possibly eat all the space on your computer.

WKT Randomizer – Creates a random written knowledge test. Note that there are small errors in this program and additions that will be made when I finish the Stenonymous Suite.

Also know that I am continuing to try to provide quality dictation on my Youtube. The QA Mario dictation is a little slower than the marked speed because of a previous error where the program counted the Q and A as a word. All future dictations should not have this problem. If you’d like to contribute dictation, I am budgeting about $5 to $10 a month to pay for guest dictators right now, and we should talk. Think along the lines of $5 for a five-minute take.

Written Knowledge Test Randomizer

ATTENTION WINDOWS USERS: Click and play version here. NO installation required. Download the zip, unzip it, and double click the .exe.

If you support projects like this, feel free to show it by buying a Sad Iron Stenographer Mug, donating, sharing this post, or suggesting questions to increase the variation in mock tests.

I’ve created a computer program that chooses preselected questions at random and creates a WKT-style test. It also creates an answer key. It uses .txt format so pretty much every computer since Windows 95 can run it. Note that for all of this stuff you should use a laptop or desktop. Using a mobile phone will make using these materials much harder. The program will change the numeral of each question every time, as well as randomize whether its answer is A, B, C, or D.

Basically, take a practice test or two, see how well you do, and if you see things you don’t know, look them up. You’ll be doing yourself a huge favor for your next written-knowledge style test.

See my previous comments on studying for legal and medical terminology.

If you hate computers, you can get 26 randomized tests here in a .zip folder.

If you want to use the program for yourself but don’t know how it works, check out my video tutorial here.

If you don’t like video tutorials, try the following:

Download and install Python 3. It probably won’t matter if it’s 3.6, or 3.7.
Go to the code for my computer program. Copy and paste it into a notepad file. If you are confused, the computer program is the text labeled 001 WKT Generator v1.py.
Save the notepad file and close it. You can name it anything. I suggest you call it ChrisDayIsAnnoying.
Change the .txt that you just saved to a .py. Read this if you do not know how to show file extensions or do not see .txt.
Now you have a .py file. It’ll look something like ChrisDayIsAnnoying.py. Take that .py file and stick it in a folder by itself. You don’t have to, but it’ll make your life easier.
Double click the .py file, or right click it and run/open it. It’s going to come up with a black box, say some words, and then you’re going to press enter, and the box is going to go away.
When the box goes away, in the folder with your .py file will be two files, Mock Test.txt and Answer Key.txt. You now have a random mock test and its answer key,
Special note, if you intend to run the program again, you must change the name of the Mock Test and Answer Key. The program creates a new Mock Test.txt and Answer Key.txt every time, and it will overwrite any files that have the same exact name as Mock Test..txt and Answer Key.txt.

Medical Terms Refresher For Test Takers

Occasionally in the testing world, we as court reporters are called upon to take multiple-choice examinations to demonstrate a basic understanding of the words and terms we might hear on the job. There have been a great many debates about whether this is necessary, but for the time being, studying some of these terms and being ready for them can enhance your chance at success and make you a more knowledgeable person. Important note: The next court reporter test for the NY courts is coming up June 29, and it often has a section devoted to medical terminology.

I picked up a quick reference guide, which at the time of writing is $0.99. I have reviewed the guide. It is short. It is a good material to have for anyone seeking to take a test that might have medical terminology on it. Also, as a stopgap measure, if you’re looking for RPR help, I have heard amazing things about Monette Benoit’s Purple Books, but we haven’t gotten a chance to review those on Stenonymous yet. Lastly there’s the Nathaniel Weiss Medical Terms Guide. Pricier than the 99-cent guide but surely more content.

Edit. After posting, Eric Allen found and linked this resource on social media. It is a great resource.

For those that cannot afford the reference guide, a brief reminder on the most common concepts that have come up in testing memory is below in bold. Go ahead and make fun of it, but I know there are test takers that will walk in there, sit down, get to the medical portion, and go completely blank. It’s time to make a stand and help those people get the job or cert of their dreams. Whether or not you buy the reference guide or take a class, make sure you familiarize yourself with the stuff that sounds most alike, because that is the stuff that will jam you up.

Anterior – front or closest in time. (Up the ante — placing a bet before getting cards.)

Posterior – back or further in time. (May help to think after. Postmortem, postscript, after death, after writing.)
Notably dorsal, dorsi, also usually related to the backside or upper side.

Arterio, that’s all about your arteries. angio or angi is all about blood vessels.

Brachio, that’s all about your arms. You don’t want to breaky-yo arm. Not to be confused with the bronchi in your lungs.

Cephal is head, encephal (in head, en head) or cranio is brain.

Ostomy is an opening. Otomy is an incision.

scope or scopy is an examination. Think microscope to stethoscope, doctor examining you.

aden or adeno has to do with glands. ren, renal, or reno has to do with your kidneys.

gastro is stomach, stoma is mouth.

thromb is talking about a blood clot.

osis is talking about a condition.

sten has to do with narrowing. A stenosis is a narrowing passage or condition in your body.

hist is talking about tissue, hyster is talking about the uterus.

cutane is talking about skin. Subcutaneous, under the skin.

rhino has to do with the nose. Just think of a rhino’s horn nose thing.

myo and muscul has to do with muscles. Myel has to do with spine or bone marrow. myringo has to do with ears, my ringing ears.

phalang has to do with fingers and toes, and pharynx has to do with your throat.

And just in case there’s a little trivia on there, plant cells have cell walls and chloroplasts. Animal cells don’t have those.