Workaround for Defender change

Following the Pearson VUE move to Azure that occurred over the weekend of Jan 31-Feb 2, there have been reports of some exams experiencing slow load times, and in some cases errors that occurred during exam start. We discovered that a recent Microsoft Defender update released over this same timeframe caused an unintended delay with the launch of some exams.

We recommend applying an Exclusion in Windows Defender on ALL Delivery workstations to resolve this issue. Steps have been provided below using Powershell, that will allow the exclusion to apply to all Test Administrators at your testing center. In our testing of this exclusion, we have seen immediate improved exam launch times.

1) From the Delivery stations, in the Windows Search box type: “Powershell” and select ‘Run as administrator’:

 2) Copy the following command into Powershell and hit Enter:

Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "C:\Users\*\AppData\Local\JxBrowser\7.37.3-b55-eap\locales\*.pak.info"

3) The exclusion should now be in place in Windows Defender and can proceed to deliver exams:

Please contact Test Center Support at Pearsonhelp.com to address any question or concerns you may have.