I failed a Microsoft Exam last Friday – yes it’s true, on occasion I fail an exam. One (amongst the many) fantastic attitude at my current employer is that a Microsoft exam fail is part of the journey of discovery. A couple of my new colleagues also remark that any significant score over the “pass” mark is a waste of study time and I can kind of see where that comes from.

The error message above was displayed by the web page when I attempted to book a resit of 70-339 Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016 and let to discovery of an interesting quirk of the system and what retake policy means in practice.

If you’ve booked exams for the last few years you will have been informed of the latest on retake policy which has been tweaked and firmed up to an extent to give candidates a proper chance between resits and not to try to brute force the attempts. At the time of writing the Exam retake policy states:

1. If a candidate does not achieve a passing score on an exam the first time, the candidate must wait at least 24 hours before retaking the exam.

This time I was particularly keen to book my resit as soon as possible, the practicalities of availability in Edinburgh means that I was expecting to have to wait a couple of weeks at least for availability so I didn’t expect the 24 hours to be a problem. I went through the exam details page, clicked “Schedule Exam”, confirmed my details and the link accounts page and got redirected back to the same page with a light yellow banner “50055: This exam is not currently offered. Please select another exam.”

So I tried a few different ways without success; inprivate, different devices and all gave the same error. I tried telephoning to be told that I would have to wait 24 hours to book. So I waited 24 hours after the end of my exam and still couldn’t book.

I was finally able to rebook through the Pearson Vue site at 18:30 on the Monday after my exam on the Friday; the exam was scheduled to end at 12:30 (My times are BST). The half hour seems more than coincidental and the take away is that the systems will prevent the booking taking place until at least a number of hours have passed on business days.

I don’t fail exams often and I certainly don’t plan to, and hopefully you don’t either. So when the unthinkable happens don’t panic and take time to regroup and make plans. And wait a day and a bit before you try to rebook!