I will not carry on studying through them

*LONG READ*

Needless to say as well as everyone else I have had issues with ICB - they do not support their distance learns properly and have insisted that it is my fault that I could not write the exam and are now charging me to write a second time. There were mitigating circumstances and as for chat help I was trying to resolve the issues for the whole 3 hours of the exam and have been told my actions were concerning. Barbara has now threatened me with being banned from writing future exams because I took to social media to raise my concerns ( after spending 2 days in communication with them over my issues ) resulting in my deciding that it is not worth my time to carry on with my studies through them. Luckily for me I have not spent the earth like other students but the end result is the same.

ICB figure your stuff out. As someone doing this completely on my own (not through a learning institution) I will not carry on.

Few things for other learners - Even if you are writing on a Mac you need to make sure that you have chrome downloaded - safari does not suffice ( didn’t knows this till 1.5 hrs into the exam and trying to get on ) - their system is not always correct. I did my technical checks on the friday( exam was on Monday) so within the 48hrs and received the message that my exam will be available at 1pm Monday but it was not. This is what took me the first 1.5hrs during chat to get sorted and was only done once I had insisted on speaking to a supervisor 4 times. - thunderstorms in my area affected the internet access which I mentioned multiple times in the chat was not taken into consideration in the time my postponement was denied. - once we realised that the internet upload speed was not strong enough to pass the technical checks on chrome ( they passed multiple times on safari) I managed to get an alternate internet source within 15 minutes of doing the speed check that was provided by a chat agent - this new internet source had an upload speed almost double what they required and told me it still wasn’t enough to run the programme.

My issue is that I didn’t give up for nearly 4 hours to even start my exam and to be dismissed has been upsetting.