As many of you know, we and many similar companies have been affected by the issues with a large merchant services provider.
We are now finalizing our work on getting new merchant services provider. Fingers crossed if it goes well, we will be up and
running at least for our most popular products within a few days (maybe the 3rd week of Nov).
Meanwhile, as a special offer, if you must have the PC software NOW, please do the following steps:
Buy EXACTLY the same product from the the iOS, Mac, or Google Play app stores.
Make a note of
Your order number at that store
Your email address that you purchased with there and
EXACTLY - please be very specific - which product(s) you purchased and ...
Write a message to our online helpdesk with A, B, and C.
We will then issue you a complimentary PC code for the same product(s).
Terms:
This offer only valid until our PC sales are back up at our own page. When it's gone it's gone.
The person using the PC software MUST be the same as the person using the iOS/Mac/Android app. Unauthorized 'sharing' is not cool.
Offer subject to withdrawal or modification without notice.
Our lab/site license program allows you to run our test prep apps on a number of "fixed" Windows PCs at your organization. This can allow your students/clients
access to our best-in-class FAA test preps in a convenient, low cost way.
Yes. What we mean by this is that lab/site licenses are intended for places where you have a number of Windows PCs available for "walk up" access by your students/clients. Examples include:
A lab or classroom full of windows PCs
Some PCs in an FBO or Flight School lobby or briefing room
Laptops which belong to a school but are lent out to students on a nightly basis.
The computers involved need not be in the same room or physical location. For example, if you are a college with 5 classrooms of 10 PCs each spread across 3 campuses, you can purchase a single "50-seat" license to cover all of the PCs.
Lab licenses can also be used for PCs in the offices of your instructors or staff. However, this is not always the most cost-effective solution (see the question on this further below - we also offer individual licenses in bulk which
may be a wiser choice for such installations.)
There is NO, repeat NO "per-student" fee. You can have as many users as you like. This makes site/lab licenses potentially VERY cost effective.
To illustrate how it works, let's consider a basic flight school with 3 fixed PCs in the common room. The FBO has purchased a site license that includes our GroundSchool FAA Private Pilot test prep for the 3 PCs. When the software
installed and the site license is activated, the software will behave slightly differently than it might if you were just a private individual who downloaded the software for private home use. Specifically, the lab-licensed
PCs will have login screens which look something like this:
2024
So, now your first student - let's call her Mary - comes along. From this login screen, Mary can create an account if she doesn't have one yet. It's totally free. The account is basically an email address and a password.
With the account created, she can then log in to the PC in front
of her and start studying.
When she's done with her study for the time being, she can log out. The next time she comes into the FBO, she can sit down at and log in at ANY of the PCs and her saved sessions and progress will
follow her around.
Unlike our competitors, we DO NOT share/give/sell your data or that of your students / customers with third parties for marketing
or any other purposes, period.
You can have an infinite number of "Marys" in theory... and Johns and Toms and Isabels and Henry's. Every student who walks into your door can be directed to a PC where they can sit down at a suitably licensed PCs, register for an account on the login screen, and study away. Not one
penny more for each additional student.
The system is neat and effective. For this to work, the computers in question have to be connected to the Internet as our servers take care of all the synchronization for you.
Our GroundSchool FAA test preps feature great tools to help students and instructors connect. Student monitoring and tracking is built in and free. Key to this is our www.TestPrepStatus.com website. In addition to letting you see the results of study sessions, it provides a number of
statistics and moving averages that provide a meaningful picture of student activity, strong/weak areas, actual-test readiness, and more.
If you're a student, you can use this to see your own progress as you study.
If you're an instructor or school, you can monitor student progress, organize students into folders/classes, and more.
If you happen to be both a student and an instructor simultaneously, you can make use of both sets of features at the same time.
If you're a school, any or all of your instructors can log in to monitor student progress.
Progress monitoring at our TestPrepStatus.com site works via a permission mechanism - either the
student can request that an instructor monitor their progress or an instructor can request to monitor a student's progress an the requested party must agree. Nothing is done without your permission.
This system is completely free for instructors, students, and schools. It works on all GroundSchool platforms (a few iOS apps have, at the time of this writing, slightly limited support for this) and work regardless of whether our apps were purchased individually, via bulk organizational purchase, or via site/lab license.
For users of our GroundSchool FAA knowledge test preps, the answer is 100% YES. Student progress tracking is built-in and free. It's built in and free regardless of whether your student is using our prep in a lab under a site/lab license at your location, on our app on a mobile device, or on their PC/Mac at home. As long as they are logged into either a lab account or a free dauntless cloud account (any user can create this themselves - it's free and in some cases is done totally transparently), then you can track them. You can track individual students or whole classes.
You can track student progress by subject area. This allows you to zero in on their strong and weak areas.
You can see how regularly they are studying
You can see their scores on simulated tests
The system provides you with a series of moving averages to help you visualize their progress better; these are provided both raw and 'smoothed' so that 'bad luck' on questions plays less of a factor in getting a picture of your student's progress.
Yes, you can organize students into folders / classes, mark past students 'inactive', and so forth.
The best way to see it work is to give it a try yourself TestPrepStatus works fine in demo mode:
Visit www.TestPrepStatus.com and set up an instructor account. Totally free.
Then, you need to link a student account with an instructor account. There are two ways to do this: If you've just created an account on testprepstatus and have no other connection to the prep, the easiest way to do this is to use the 'invite' feature there to invite a 'demo' student that you might have created so that you can see how it works (or, if you have a real student with you, you can try that too!). This is the 'instructor initiated' way of doing it. There's also a 'student initiated' way within the individual apps (usually on the 'test results' screen) where the student can request an instructor to monitor their progress. This way, the system is permission based, as is naturally required.
As the student studies, their scores will be sent up to the TestPrepStatus.com system at the end of each session. As an instructor, you can log in to TestPrepStatus.com from wherever you are and see how they are doing.
Please note that TestPrepStatus.com is currently only connected to our FAA Knowledge Test preps. If you are reading this and are interested in this service for our other test preps, please let us know.
Let's that say Mary wanted to study at home or on her phone or tablet at work as she found that she couldn't put in sufficient hours at the computer in the FBO. Mary could purchase a personal copy of the software or app in question for
the platform of her choice. In some cases, you could even sell/give it to her if you took advantage of our Bulk Purchase offers. But let's say Mary purchases the app for her iPhone via the Apple App Store.
Inside that app, she could then log in to her "Dauntless Cloud Account" - this is the same account she signed up for in your FBO/lab a couple questions above. Her progress, saved sessions, and more will nicely sync. Total flexibility and
a smooth, ubiquitous user experience means faster, frustration-free study and students passing that test with confidence and style!
Unlike our competitors, we DO NOT share/give/sell your data or that of your students / customers with third parties for marketing
or any other purposes, period.
If you have instructors at your school who could benefit from having access to the test prep content inside of our apps, you have a few choices:
As in the previous question, you might want to organizationally buy individual licenses for them in bulk and hand one out to each. Individual licenses are permanently tied to individuals (they cannot be reassigned) and are lifetime licenses.
Alternately, your instructors can just sit down at any lab licensed PC that you have, just like any student.
Your instructors can buy their own apps for platforms like Mac, Android, and/or iOS, just like Mary did above.
Lab licenses are sold by the year. There is no provision for shorter terms, so please plan ahead as necessary.
When you purchase a lab license, you specify a start date and the license will begin on that day. In practice, the licenses are normally enabled a few weeks before the start date in order to allow your technical team to install
the software at your site and to make sure the system is working fine. Of course, it would not be correct to have students using the software for normal study before the license formally starts, so please don't do that. Licenses renew
yearly; you can cancel any time. Once purchased, site licenses are strictly not returnable, either in whole or in part, even if your license start date has not yet been reached.
First of all, lab licenced PCs need to be PCs running a reasonably recent and up to date version of Microsoft Windows. No Macs, no Chromebooks, no Android, no iPhone, no iPads. Just PCs running Microsoft Windows. Beyond this, the PCs should be connected to the internet as they will need to access our servers for user authentication, saving and loading study sessions from the cloud, getting updates, and so forth. If you are in a networked / secure environment, as will be the case in many schools and organizations, you may need the assistance of your network administrators
to install and configure the software. It is very possible that as a 'regular user' on your organization's network you will not personally have the ability to install software - your
system administrator can help. If you want to get a feel for the product before getting your local administrator involved, please visit our site from your home PC and download and try
out a free demo there.
Update: Due to particularly restrictive or complicated security setups in some network environments, a small number of institutional users have in the past
reported issues with getting out apps to work in a lab environment without administrator access. Should you experience this, please reach
out our helpdesk, as we have additional versions in our arsenal that we can offer to lab/site license customers with such issues which use a different storage/security policy and which will probably work better for you.
Our lab licenses are basically "number of hardware devices" licenses. In other words, if you have 2 classrooms of 10 PCs each where one classroom is only ever used in the morning and the other is only used in the afternoon, this
requires 20 seat licenses. This is true even if one set of computers is completely turned off while the others are in use. This does not preclude the ability to transfer the seat license from one
PC to another when PCs are permanently withdrawn from service for upgrade or similar legitimate reasons (see question below).
To give an example that helps better convey what is and what is not cool by our lab licenses terms, consider two similar situations. In each scenario, assume the school has purchased a 10 seat license.
Scenario 1: The fall cohort uses the software at Lab A, but then over the winter break Lab A shut down in a long planned move and a shiny new computer Lab B is established at another campus.
The old PCs at the Lab A are recycled. Lab B happens to be closer to the spring cohort.
Scenario 2: The fall cohort studies at lab A. During the winter break, the administrators intentionally uninstall the software from Lab A, and install it on 10 PCs at Lab B to be closer to the spring cohort.
Scenario 1 is basically fine. The lab move was planned and any use pattern changes to our software were incidental. Scenario 2 is not authorized and would be contrary to the terms of license. Intent matters, and in this case an attempt was made to basically "be clever with" our
license.
We offer what we believe to be a fair license and a decent price. If you have any questions about licensing and usage, please reach out to us and ask. You'll find us to be generally easygoing and understanding. It's our responsibility
to all of our customers, however, to make the system fair for all.
We have designed our site license offerings of different test groups based on customer requests. It is normal that you are unlikely to need some things in any given package - the
pricing has been developed with an awareness and understanding of this. In other words, you won't be "paying for something you won't need" as any "lesser" bundling would have the same price anyway.
That also said, if you are a larger customer and require a specific product mix that you don't see listed, please reach out to us.
It's no problem if you replace your PCs. If you have seat licenses for 10 PCs and the physical PCs that those licenses are now associated with are slated for physical replacement, you can replace some or all of them without paying for additional licenses. The recommended procedure is that you uninstall the software completely
from the outgoing PCs before you physically remove them, and then install and activate the software on the new PCs. This is normal and fine. Of course, this is not to be abused in order to find some clever scheme
to buy fewer licensees than is fair and required. The system has safeguards in place against such abuse, but ultimately, if you need more licenses, please buy them.
Our editorial team regularly updates our test prep content. This happens many times throughout the year typically as we want to get the latest and greatest updates to you ASAP. Content updates are built in and free. And here's the even
better thing: from a system administrator's perspective, you don't have to do much. If a student sits down at a PC to study and the system detects there are updates, the app will tell the user who will basically almost always agree
to download and updates then and there. If you want to be extra sure, your can periodically manually run the content update from the main menu of the app if you were so inclined.
We have no specific demo of our lab license, but you are more than welcome to try our test prep software itself in single user demo mode. To do this, please visit www.FAAtest.com. There, you will find links to various test groups
(Private Pilot, etc.) Click on the group of your choice. Then, on the group page, find the big download box and download the PC demo to your local computer and install it there. The demo lets you try out our app and see
how it works (albeit without the lab features, but that's a small thing). You'll see our smooth user experience and our best in class content. Demo mode gives you access to about 5% of the questions only. We very much welcome
and encourage you to try a demo before purchase. Nearly everybody who tries our prep in demo mode ends up buying it, as it's far superior to our competition and at the same time this allows us to weed out technical incompatibilities and
get other such problems solved early, to everybody's mutual benefit.
Generally speaking, no, they do not. However, the specifics may differ based on your specific network security setup. Like nearly every other app on PCs, however, if you're running in a securitized/secure networked environment then you
will need the assistance of a system administrator to set things up. This may include the administrator doing things during the initial setup in administrator mode. Again, this is normal for all similar software.
Under some security configurations, you may need to install and activate the software under an administrator account before you then also install the software as you might any other software for individual user access. This is to allow
the software to see the global site license. This should not be necessary on most installations, however. In all cases, lab licensed software should be installed with the help of your local PC support gurus at your organization. If
you run into real trouble, please have your internal technical guys reach out to us via our helpdesk. Finally, whether or not you need to go through the activation process on each PC in your lab depends on your exact security and
deployment configuration. For some sites the answer is yes, for others no.
Update: Due to particularly restrictive or complicated security setups in some network environments, a small number of institutional users have in the past
reported issues with getting out apps to work in a lab environment without administrator access. Should you experience this, please reach
out our helpdesk, as we have additional versions in our arsenal that we can offer to lab/site license customers with such issues which use a different storage/security policy and which will probably work better for you.
Much like our regular individual retail users get, you get an unlock keycode access emailed to you after your order is complete and payment is received. This keycode will be in the receipt email that you
receive from our MyCommerce/Digital River/ShareIt merchant partners. Yours will be special, however, since when you activate it, the software in question will be turned into the site licensed version.
For help with activating the software, please see our unlock help wizard.
To get the software itself, download the demo version of the single-user software you are interested in from www.FAATest.com. Activating it using your site license keycode will turn on "site license mode" where your students/clients/users will see that login screen. To be clear: activating turns the demo mode software into the paid for software. There are no further downloads save for routine content updates and the occasional update to the main
software itself.
Yes, we sure do love writing out own questions for this FAQ document. Seriously though, we get such sentiments a lot. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, we've totally automated the site license sales and fulfillment process, which eliminates a ton of overhead. Second, we benefit both because keeping it cheap allows us to stay hopefully within the budgets of organizations such as high schools that we might not otherwise be able to reach. Third, we know that a certain percentage of students who study on a site-licensed PCs will also be likely to want a copy for home or mobile device usage, and we view the additional sales as subsidizing the lab license. Win-win-win for all involved.
Our lab licenses are priced so that quantities are to be understood as "up to" quantities. For example, if you have 85 lab PCs but see only quantities 75 and 100 in purchase choices, you should select "100" (as 75 won't be enough). You can think of the pricing of the "100" as being you paying for 76 and everything above that up and to 100 being "free" (in a manner of speaking). The pricing reflects this. This also tends to give larger organizations in particular a bit more flexibility.
You can - there's nothing stopping you if you have paid for enough seats. However, in most situations that we can think of, this might not be the most cost effective choice. Rather, for individuals who are likely to be with your organization for a while and who have their own PCs, so to speak, it is often better to buy individual licenses for them (these can be bought in bulk, too), since the individual licenses have no expiration date. There are two caveats to this: one, please remember that once
activated by an individual, it would be against the terms of license to further use/transfer/give/share/etc the activated software or the associated keycode to any other individual. Two: installing individual software and activating it may
require the intervention of a system administrator in a networked/secure/corporate environment. Finally, please remember that if a given person has an individual license, they can then install and use the software on more than one of their
personal computers - for example, on their personal home laptop in addition to their office PC. With a lab license, each physical device would require a separate seat license.
