Oh, where should we begin?
The highlights:
About a week before the campaign was due to start, somebody leaked the answers to the online SJT to a friend studying Law at a nearby university (the guilty party was alleged to be a student on a work placement year with the recruitment company who build the online form in Bristol). The answers went viral within UK law schools and this was reported back to the recruitment company concerned
before the start date.
Said company sat on it and did nothing, and then a week in to the campaign the GLP found out and put a formal statement on gov.uk to say that 'steps had been taken to protect the integrity of the test'. That's a pretty major step to take, so it was obvious that they were hugely concerned.
However, the steps taken were simply to rearrange the order of the questions (not even the order of the answers!). As a result, a new answer key was drawn up and distributed by the student groups within about an hour! The recruitment firm then rearranged the answer sequence a couple of times - and the test cheats simply created new keys. Finally there were 4 different SJTs in play and 4 keys circulating - all identifiable because with each new test, the recruitment company put a reference number on the first page. Therefore there was one key for GLS022, one for GLS023 etc. The last few emails circulating had all four keys with a clear indication of which form each one applied to,.
In other words, it was all totally compromised.
End result was that hundreds of people cheated and pushed themselves artificially into the next round, but it could have been avoided if the recruitment company hadn't tried to cover it up at the start and hadn't falsely claimed that their 'solutions' were viable.
Added to this, the application form had loads of errors in it, for example asking candidates what their 'principle degree subject' was etc. Not major, but a bit shabby for a premier grad competition. From the rumours about the leaking, they were still putting the online form together the week before it went live.
Then came the online test stages and there were problems with adding reasonable adjustments. For the VRT test, candidates got 4 separate emails including two test links and they had to guess which one to use. Many candidate test score were lost and the company failed people for not taking the test and only admitted their error when confronted with evidence by SHL (the people who ran the test - another third party). As a helpdesk, the official 'govtrainees' gang were pretty shocking. Somebody joked, 'it was where candidate queries go to die'.
The problem with adjustments was caused by the recruitment company offshoring to their office in India (without the knowledge of the GLP!!) which was done because they didn't have enough staff to cope with volumes of applicant queries. Throughout the campaign, you would be lucky to get through on the phone or get a response by email. If you did speak to someone, they either didn't know anything about the GLP or they just cut you off. Where they gave answers, they were often incomprehensible. It turns out that the Indian team got a 30-minute training brief and told to get stuck in, which is apparently what was happening in the UK. All massive corner-cutting and very questionable professionally to offshore without permission etc.
It got so bad that applicants were coming onto TSR to ask questions and GLP staff had to answer them (in fact they did a damned good job and supported loads of candidates).
Then some staff at the recruitment company went rogue and started coming on here to berate applicants, and they got swiftly barred. Some of them were really obnoxious. I mean, it was obvious that they had just been used as cannon fodder by the recruitment company, but they were horrendously unprofessional.
At the end of the campaign, somebody posted on here, TSR, that a lot of offers would be withdrawn due to Brexit, which caused a panic and the GLP had to contact everybody to say it was all untrue.
It then turned out that this 'fake news' had come from the recruitment company themselves (!!) who had deliberately leaked it to some internal 'suspects',so they could find out who was making comments criticizing them. I don't know whether it worked (it appeared not to - mainly because they leaked the false story to a group so they still didn't know who the leaker was) but it only led to more confusion, a pretty irresponsible thing to do.
To cap it all, the recruitment company released a case study (without GLP's knowledge or input) celebrating the massive success of the campaign, which after a few weeks mysteriously disappeared!! You can only think that it was the final straw.
Early in the campaign, Legal Cheek published a story on it and the comments (particularly the more recent ones) were very revealing, including some from staff at the Government Legal Department who were apparently very irate at the way in which everything had been handled.
https://www.legalcheek.com/2019/07/answers-to-government-legal-training-contract-schemes-situational-judgement-test-surface-online/Full marks to the GLP and GLD staff themselves though (especially
@CAJonseywho for a while seemed to be working full-time on it) , they were excellent and made a huge difference in the end. Unfortunately for me, I didn't reach the assessment centre so not sure how smoothly the later stages went.
The 2019 thread highlights a lot of this, though quite a few posts were removed because they breached site rules
https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6023568So, yeah, it looks like the GLP used an external provider who just took the money and ran. I think a lot of people will be hoping that they aren't called back.
(**Edited 13th May to make the text clearer.)