As you can tell from previous posts, I’ve taken a few Microsoft Certification exams here in 2020. As you may have also heard, there’s been this Coronavirus pandemic happening at the same time, which means any such exam taken since mid-March of this year has to be done online and not in the comfort of a test taking center.

I’ve taken four of these exams so far this year from the comfort of my home. It’s definitely different from taking an exam at a testing center. If you’re interested in learning a bit more, click on through.

I want to first acknowledge there have been horror stories about taking these exams at home. In fact, I was very hesitant after reading a post by Cathrine Wilhelmsen earlier this year. Catherine appears to have removed all posts from here site at the moment, but you can read a cached version of the post here. That post is from 2015, but what concerned me the most was seeing all the comments about similar disastrous experiences all the way up to this year.

But, given that it was take an exam online or don’t take it at all, my options were verrrry limited.

The first thing I can tell you is that when I’ve gone to schedule these exams the dates and times available are usually full for the next 48 hours or so. In fact, once I found they were full for the next 14 days, although when I went back a few hours later that was not an issue. Definitely weird, but…*shrug*

Wallflower

There’s a lot of email instructions about the whole procedure, and part of that includes a systems check the day before the exam. This is to give you time to fix any issues well before your exam happens. For me this mean connecting, running a systems check, and then downloading an app to yourphone that allows you to take pictures of your identification as well as the front, back, left, and right of my workspace, and uploading those pictures.

The thinking here is that you don’t want to have anything that could possibly be a “cheat sheet” visible from wherever you take the exams, so be sure to clean your desk. I actually set up a card table in a spare bedroom and just put my laptop on it. Everything was fine.

On the day of the exam, you check in, and if you click the wrong boxes, you do all that pre-check stuff all over again, including taking and uploading pictures. This process takes about 10 minutes since the phone app is incredibly slow, so be sure to check in 15 minutes before your scheduled exam.

Once all of that is done, you close all apps on your computer except the PearsonVue app, which has a tiny window of your face in the screen at the top. At this point you are waiting for a proctor to start the exam.

Here’s where things can get weird.

Shock the Monkey

As I said, I’ve taken four exams and had four different ways of starting the exam. The first online exam I took I was contacted by the proctor and asked to stand up and show my pockets were empty, and to pick up my laptop and pan the camera around to make sure my workspace was the same as when I had taken the pictures. Contrast that with the latest exam, when the proctor did not identify themselves and simply started the exam.

So, be ready for anything.

Once the exam starts, you have your face remain in the little camera box AT ALL TIMES. If you leave the camera, or even turn your head and don’t face the camera, you will be warned the exam could be terminated. That is not your desired outcome.

Just as important, you are not allowed to mouth any words. I sometimes read words aloud when I am reading them and they don’t seem to make sense, perhaps hoping that hearing them might make them more sensible to my mind. DON’T DO THIS or you will get chastised and warned by your proctor.

I Have the Touch

Also important to note, you are not allowed to put your hand ANYWHERE NEAR YOUR MOUTH. I think the thinking here is that you might be mumbling to Cortana or Clippy or the Microsoft gnome that lives under your desk that has already passed these exams.

If you can remember those main things, you’re probably going to be OK.

I’ve been fortunate in that I haven’t had the technical difficulties or overzealous proctor’s that other have written about, and I will say that it is convenient to be able to take these exams at home. So long as I continue to have this run of good fortune I’d say I actually prefer taking exams this way than in a testing center.