September 23rd, 2007

University of Phoenix Test Scores Contact Information

I was trying to register to take a CLEP exam, to earn some credits and work towards finishing my degree at University of Phoenix, but I had trouble with a couple questions on the registration form. Question #22 on the CLEP registration form asked for information about the “Score Recipient”, which, in my case, is University of Phoenix. But the form asked for a “Code No.” and “Institution Name and Address”.

Here is the appropriate information, according to my academic counselor. She said it’s the only “Code No.” and “Institution Name and Address” that anyone needs, when trying to have any test scores (not just for CLEP tests) sent to UOP:

CLEP TEST CENTER ADMISSION FORM

22. Score Recipient:

Code No. 014593

Institution Name and Address:

Phoenix-Uopc-Student Services AA-K101
1221 N. College Ave
Tempe, AZ 85281

Okay… I just had to share that information publicly, since it was rather difficult for me to find. Now, I’ll discuss how hard it was for me to find it.

Well, I couldn’t find the information in any of the CLEP-related emails and documents that my academic counselors have sent me, over the past few years, so I searched on the UOP student website. I couldn’t find the code number, and did not know which of UOP’s addresses was the one to have test scores sent to. Since UOP has campuses all over the US (and beyond?), as well as a particularly large online presence, I didn’t know whether the scores should be sent to my local campus, or the main Phoenix, AZ campus, or what.

When I looked up UOP on the College Board’s website, I found a code number, and two addresses: some kind of main address, and the admissions office; both of which were in Arizona. I didn’t know which one to have the scores sent to.

So, I emailed my academic counselor, giving her the information I’d found, and asked which address to use. I was feeling impatient, though, because I’ve been procrastinating this CLEP stuff for a *very* long time, and was so close to finally dealing with it. So, I kept looking for the info, myself.

The main UOP website was not very useful, but I did run across some kind of “Chat with someone NOW” link, so I tried that. When I asked the person for the info that I needed, he was not sure, so he asked for my phone number, called me, and conferenced me in with my academic counselor. I felt bad for nagging her, since I had just sent her that email so recently, but she was able to find the information that I needed.

Hopefully the information is correct, and hopefully others will have an easier time finding it, now. I’ll post some sort of follow-up, to let you know how things go with my CLEP registration, as well as the subsequent score reporting.

Posted by spugbrap at 09:59pm EDT 6 Comments 

Categories: testing, uop, clep, school, contact_info, useful, questions, reporting, reference, personal

July 13th, 2006

Generating a random fake name from the commandline

Today I needed to come up with a list of lots of fake names for test data. In the past, I either manually entered well-known fictional character names (e.g. Homer J. Simpson), or used strings of characters (like ‘asdf g. hjkl’ or ‘aaaaaaaaaaaaaa’).

I remembered seeing some sort of test data generator, somewhere, recently, so I googled for “fake name generator test data“.

What I found was http://www.fakenamegenerator.com, which generates realistic test data based on country, name origin, and gender specifications. More info on the site at the end of this post. Here’s a set of commands that I put together to retrieve one fake name from that site:

curl -s -b agreement=Yes “http://www.fakenamegenerator.com”
| grep -o ‘on Google”>\([^<]\+\)’
| sed -e “s/[^>]*>\([^<<]\+\)<.*/\1/g”

When you use the site like a normal human being, the fake data that is generated includes full name, address, email address (usable, provided by an anonymous email service), phone number, mother’s maiden name, date of birth, and credit card number (+ expiration date). Very cool! For a very small fee, you can also order a bulk batch of data, which also includes fake Social Security Numbers).

However, being the penny-pinching and geeky type, I wanted to be able to generate my own list of fake names (without all the other info), for free. The set of commands listed above work right now, from a cygwin bash shell, but will probably break sometime in the future, when the HTML structure of the page changes. Oh well.

Oh yeah, don’t forget to read their terms of service* before using the service… Right now, I could not find anything prohibiting the use of automated tools to generate and retrieve names, but use the above set of commands at your own risk!

* The terms of service page only displays one time, unless you clear/disable your cookies.

Posted by spugbrap at 02:13pm EDT 1 Comment 

Categories: tools, testing, data, generator, commandline, hacks, tips, howto, bash, geek