Get back in if you are locked out
Purpose
Work out why you cannot get in, and what to do about it.
Who this is for
Anyone who cannot open an assessment, sign in, or find something they had before.
Start here: what exactly is failing?
| Symptom | Section below |
|---|---|
| The assessment link will not open | The link does not work |
| I cannot sign in | Signing in |
| I forgot my password | Signing in |
| I am waiting for a verification email | Signing in |
| My answers are gone | My saved answers vanished |
| I have an access code and want my answers back | Using an access code |
| I answered before signing in and cannot find it | Linking earlier answers |
| My invitation expired | Expired invitations |
| I was given a join key and a passcode | Joining with a key and passcode |
| I stopped getting emails | If you unsubscribed |
The link does not work
Match the message on screen:
"This assessment is not available" — the link has been closed by the organisers, has expired, or was mistyped. Assessment links are case-insensitive but every character counts; copy and paste it rather than retyping. If it is definitely right, the round has probably closed — ask the organisers.
"We could not load this assessment" — a temporary problem. Choose Try again. If it keeps happening, try a different network.
"Access Denied" — this really is a permissions problem. Sign in, or ask whoever sent the link to check that you were included.
"This link is not valid for this assessment" — the link opens a different questionnaire, or was copied incompletely. Copy the whole thing from the email.
"This link is no longer valid" — personal links are issued for a limited time, and they stop working the moment a new one is issued in their place. If somebody resent your invitation, the newest email is the one that works.
"This assessment needs your personal link" — the campaign only accepts responses from the people it invited, so the public address of the questionnaire will not open it. Use the link emailed to you.
"You have already completed this" — not a failure. You finished it, and the page shows the date. Nothing was submitted twice and your original answers are unchanged. If you need to change an answer, ask the campaign owner to reopen your submission; they can, and you get a link back in.
"This campaign is currently closed" / "This campaign has been archived" — the whole round has ended. The message shown is written by the organisers. The assessment itself has its own, shorter version of this — "This campaign is closed" — if you reach it by its own address rather than through the campaign page.
"This campaign needs its passcode" — the campaign is passcode-protected and this browser has not been through the door yet. The screen offers Go to the campaign entry page, which is where the passcode goes; a passcode lasts twelve hours in that browser.
Two of them — not valid for this assessment and no longer valid — end in the same action, and that is honest rather than lazy: ask whoever invited you to send a new link. Nobody else can mint one, and your answers so far are saved. This assessment needs your personal link points you at the invitation email instead, and says nothing about saved answers because at that point there usually are none.
Signing in
Sign-in is handled by BIMei, not by Assessorio. There is one control, and it says Continue with BIMei (or Sign in with BIMei on an invitation page). Your password, two-factor settings and account recovery all live on the BIMei side.
So:
- Forgotten password? Reset it through BIMei — choose Continue with BIMei and use the recovery options there. Assessorio cannot reset it for you, and nobody here can see it.
- Waiting for a verification email? Stop waiting. Assessorio sends none. If BIMei needs to verify anything it does so on its own pages during sign-in.
- "We couldn’t sign you in" — BIMei could not complete the hand-off. Choose Try again with BIMei. If it persists, contact an administrator of the account you are joining.
- "Your sign-in has expired. Sign in again to continue." — the page sat open longer than the session lasts. Sign in again; nothing is lost.
There is no email-and-password form anywhere in Assessorio, on any account. If you are reading older instructions that describe one, they predate the change.
My saved answers vanished
Progress on an assessment is held in the browser you started in. It disappears if you switch browser or device, use a private window, or clear your browsing data.
If you were given a personal link, open that link again on the original device — it carries your identity and brings your draft back with it.
If you answered anonymously, the access code you were shown on the completion screen is the way back; see below. Without it there is no way to recover the draft — the answers were never attached to a name, which is the point.
If you had already submitted, nothing is lost either way: your submission is on the server.
See Save your place and come back for how to avoid this next time.
Using an access code
An anonymous submission issues a code once, on the completion screen, under Keep a copy, or a way back. It is shown that one time and cannot be recovered. It does two things.
Carry on somewhere else. Open the questionnaire on the new device and expand Continue on this device with an access code below the questions. Paste the code, spaces and all, and choose Continue with this code. It loads the answers saved against that code and replaces anything unsaved on the device you are on — so do it before you start answering there, not after.
See, export or delete what is held. From the completion screen choose
Export or delete my answers later, or go to /a/<assessment key>/my-data.
Enter the code and choose Show my answers. The page lists the questionnaire,
when you submitted, how long the answers are kept, and every answer as stored.
From there, Download a copy or Delete my answers — the deletion is
permanent, cannot be undone, and stops the code working.
Anything you attached is deleted with your answers. If you uploaded a document to support one of your responses, deleting the submission removes the file as well, not just the answer that pointed at it. The same is true when a questionnaire's responses reach the end of the retention period the page shows you: the answers and the attachments go together, on the same date.
If the code is refused you will see That code does not match any saved answers for this questionnaire or We could not find a submission for that code. Check you are on the right questionnaire: a code belongs to one of them.
Linking earlier answers
If you answered an assessment without signing in, and later signed in on the same device, a small panel appears at the bottom-left of the screen:
Link your earlier responses? We found responses you submitted on this device before signing in. Link them to your account?
Choose Link them and they are attached to your account. Choose Not now and the prompt goes away for this session.
The prompt only appears in the browser you answered in, and only for assessments you actually submitted. It links only submissions filed under your own signed-in email address, so it cannot pick up somebody else's work.
Somebody else's name is above the questions
On a shared device, opening the bare assessment address resumes the last invited person's session rather than quietly starting an anonymous one — because filing your colleague's answers as an anonymous submission is the worse outcome.
The band offers Not you? Start fresh beside the name. Choosing it clears that binding from the device and starts you cleanly where the campaign accepts a walk-up response; where it does not, it tells you that you need your own link. The button appears only on a resumed session, never on a link you have just clicked.
Expired invitations
Invitation links carry an expiry date, stated in the invitation email. Once past it the link no longer works, and neither does the campaign passcode on its own. Ask whoever invited you to resend it — they can, without starting again, and the resent email carries your assessment links as well as the invitation.
A resend also invalidates the older link. If you have two invitation emails, use the newer one.
Joining with a key and passcode
If you were given an account join key and a passcode rather than a link:
sign in first, then go to /join, enter both, and choose Join account. The
join key is the account's short name — your administrator has it.
If you see Please sign in first, then come back, do exactly that.
If the key and passcode are rejected you get one message — Unable to join. Check
the join key and passcode. — whichever of the two was wrong. Before asking for
new ones, check you are not confusing two different things: a campaign
passcode is entered on the campaign sign-in page at /auth/entry, while an
account join key and passcode are entered at /join.
Joining this way gives you access as a participant. If you were expecting to see an account workspace and instead see This workspace is not open to you, that is the normal result — ask an administrator to add you properly.
If you unsubscribed
The unsubscribe link at the bottom of a reminder stops everything we would send that address, including future invitations — not only reminders. If you unsubscribed and have since stopped receiving invitations you were expecting, that is why. Ask the people running the assessment to escalate it — only a platform administrator can take an address off the suppression list.
Unsubscribing does not withdraw consent for answers you have already given. Those are separate acts; tell the organisers if you want the second one recorded.
Still stuck
Contact the people running the assessment. They can see your participant record, resend an invitation, change your status, or reopen a submission. Include the assessment name and the email address you used. The personal-link failure screens in the assessment carry a Contact us link, and every failure screen carries a Help link into this documentation.
The app's own support page at assessor.bimexcellence.org/support carries a contact form: your name, your email address, your organisation if you want to give it, and what you need help with. If no support mailbox has been bound to that deployment yet, the page says so on the form rather than quietly promising a reply.