I do not have the most up to date info on the status of 83-640 so i encourage you to verify the following info but here is my story.... Last I heard about 1.5 years ago the 83-640 was rolled back to the 70-640 exam, as I was taking classes and studying for
the 83-640 using books of the 6425B/6426B courseware. Several other students had taken the 83-640 exam and several of them reported that the exam would either lock up during or would crash when submitting the exam as complete and could not get a score report
and they would have to retake/reschedule the exam. I also heard that some 3rd party neither MS or Prometric were hosting the virtual servers for the hands on lab portion of the exam and that this supposed 3rd (unknown) party was the problem of the crashes....Well
eventually too many of these crashes happened and MS eventually rolled back the 83-640 exam to the original 70-640 exam basically eliminating the lab portion of the exam and making it all Q&A again.
So while I could be wrong unless this problem has been fixed 83-640 is not a available exam.
What made me mad, is that i had almost finished the prep for 83-640 as provided by my instructors and then i heard of this problem and the rollback - so i had to change the focus of my studies to the 70-640 version, once i had finished studying again, I
took the exam and failed with a score of 500/1000, then because i had a test pass guarantee i retook the course and studied and studied and did practice exam after practice exam, got to where i had nearly memorized all the suggested measureup.com practice
exam and finally attempted the exam again last month and got the exact same score as the 1st time. This is very frustrating as now it seems that research has shown me that the exam has been updated to a 3rd version or R2 and the new books suggested for me
to retake the class again is 6425C and 6426C.
So if i am correct your 1st edition material is probably outdated for the exam...I think MS should be required to notify students when they have updated a test so people dont run into problems like these - granted we would have to sign up on some sort of
email list or something but i have yet to find such a list- I have signed up for several newsletters but i dont know if it will provide me with the needed info. Another idea is to make the exam numbers match the course numbers so if you take a 6425b course
then you take a 6425b exam or at least add the relevant a/b/c letters to the 70-640 making it 70-640a or 70-640b and so on. This would help a student to know he/she has been studying the correct material when they sit down for a test.
You might look at the following link is what i found is the appropriate version of books/courseware for the 70-640 exam
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-640&locale=en-us#tab3
GO TEAM VENTURE!!!
