The college hasn’t released the amount that it settled for, but it’s understood to be in the neighbourhood of $6m.
The RACGP’s legal action against the company that bungled a high-stakes fellowship exam in 2020 is over almost before it began, with both parties agreeing to an out-of-court settlement.
The lawsuit, which was only announced at the RACGP’s annual general meeting in November, relates to the 2020.2 Key Feature Problem exam.
Less than an hour into the online test – which had already been delayed by several months due to the pandemic – the camera streaming software used for invigilation crashed and left registrars unable to complete the exam.
Ultimately, the college elected to cancel the KFP as well as the Applied Knowledge Test scheduled for the following day.
Trainees were able to resit the exams with pen and paper a few months later.
It later emerged that the RACGP had been warned about issues with remote examination platform Genix well before the spectacular exam-day failure.
All 1400 affected registrars were refunded, a move that is understood to have cost the college approximately $6 million.
Barely four months after the college confirmed it had taken legal action against Genix, it told members that it had settled with the software company outside of court.
Related
“The Board acknowledges the frustration, inconvenience and disruption experienced by candidates, many of whom experienced delays in undertaking the exams due to safety concerns relating to the covid-19 pandemic jurisdictional restrictions,” a notice in the February board report read.
The RACGP has not disclosed the dollar amount that it received as part of the settlement, but it’s understood to be close to the amount it lost when it refunded the registrars.
It has since moved away from computer-based exams.
