So two weeks ago today, on December 22nd, 2014 I had my VCAP5-DCD exam scheduled (the 5.5 version).
I was honestly hoping to share with you some of my positive experience about it, only… the exam did not happen.
I was in pre-exam “panic mode” on the Sunday evening before, browsing through the official blueprint, some exotic KBs and all the other stuff, you know.
Contrary to popular belief I’m not 24/7 online and my plan was to go to bed early (as I had the exam scheduled for 8 am Monday), so I checked my e-mail only before going to sleep, round 10 pm it was.
And there it was.
And I freaked out.
Cause I did not cancel my exam, alright?
Especially not within 24 hrs before it (it equals loosing the fee anyways, alright?).
Of course nobody from Pearson VUE support was online or available over the phone on Sunday evening, so I decided to pretend not to have seen this message, go to the testing center like nothing happened and explain any issues onsite.
“Computer says NO” were (almost) the first words I could hear that Monday morning, cause once “I cancelled” my exam, the appointment was removed from Pearson’s scheduling system, with no trace of its previous existence whatsoever (except for the e-mails and printouts of appointment confirmations I showed to the guys there).
After I explained this must be some kind of mistake, the guys onsite were very professional and helpful, escalated it to the highest Pearson support level available, generally did everything they could (it was 1st case of this kind for them as well) to solve the issue for me.
The result of this investigation can be summarized by the picture below:
All in all – it is for the best I think. I don’t want to loose any points because of errors in the exam engine (that will be corrected by this “development update”, as I understand) and I have (at least) 3 weeks more for study, alright?
The Pearson guys onsite and the ones from support teams we contacted were all very professional with helping me to explain this situation, also the exam fee was returned to my credit card within 48 hours (and these are all good things 😉 ).
But my overall experience of this “almost exam” would be much better, if the initial e-mail contained the explanation what was really going on and not the suggestion I did cancel the exam myself (I honestly had “paranoid” ideas like: “somebody has hacked my Pearson account!”).
Also: have some mercy guys, don’t send messages like this 12 hours before the exam is scheduled 😉
If not useful, I hope my first post in 2015 at least made you smile, stay tuned for “real exam” experience in about 3 weeks!
