‘I’m tearing my hair out’: Music teacher frustration over ABRSM exam booking

Music teachers trying to book ABRSM exams online are ‘wasting’ hours in virtual queues as the system struggles to cope with high demand and a planned update.

Introduced in January 2020, the new online system promised to ‘transform the exam booking process’, ‘dramatically improving’ the user experience for teachers, parents and candidates.

ABRSM customers have taken to Twitter to voice their frustrations since the second booking session of the year opened on 4 May, with teachers and parents reporting increasingly long waiting times, a lack of available slots, sessions timing out, ‘stress’ and ‘disruption’.

Issue with the map function

The exam board has kept customers updated via Twitter, attributing the issues to ‘very high demand’ and taking the system offline for an hour on Wednesday evening while they worked to ‘increase capacity’. 

ABRSM told MT that the problems have arisen because they were ‘trying to introduce a new mapping function to aid identification of venues with availability’, but this ‘hasn’t worked as [they] had hoped.’

Upon gaining access to the portal, some users are finding that very few exams are available in their areas, but ABRSM says that ‘there are plenty of available slots’.

‘Ridiculous and unnavigable website’

Saxophonist, composer and music teacher Rachel Forsyth spent from 7:15am to 11pm on Wednesday trying to book an exam for her student, without success. Signing in again this morning (Thursday), she found that there were no exam centres available.

She told MT: ‘It was only when someone mentioned on Twitter that the map function wasn’t available that I gave it another go. You can’t find the venues on the map and, when you search, it says there are no slots available - it’s only when you go into each venue that you can see that they do have slots.

‘I have wasted so much time trying to get through a ridiculous and unnavigable website, and the stress of it has been ridiculous. My poor student has started a fourth piece today in preparation for swapping to a digital grade.’

Forsyth added: ‘This is my last session with ABRSM. I’ve been using their exam board since 2005 and have had enough now. It’s not worth the stress and effort. ABRSM has lost sight of what’s important.’

‘Total shambles’

Violin teacher Benedict Heaney said that he was still ‘tearing [his] hair out’ when he spoke to MT about his attempt to book three violin exams for students. ‘It’s been nearly 30 hours since I started. I lost my first slot after eight hours because I had to go to work, and then lost my second slot because it was in the middle of the night.’

Heaney queued for more than two hours this morning (Thursday), but was met with apparent unavailability. ‘I ended up scrolling through every page of dates to eventually reach a vaguely suitable date, only for the registration page to crash when I tried to enter the candidate ID.’

He said that he has never had a problem with the ABRSM booking system before, ‘other than it being a bit frantic getting a viable date’, but that ‘this is a total shambles’.

‘[ABRSM] needs to offer a discount - flimsy words of “sorry for the long wait” do not make up for the hours spent in sheer frustration. I’m really unhappy and am flabbergasted that their system has failed so monumentally.’ 

‘Working hard behind the scenes’

When approached by MT for comment, ABRSM’s chief executive Chris Cobb said: ‘We know that our booking system has been underperforming in the last couple of days and understand that this is a source of huge frustration for many of our customers, as it is for us too. 

‘These issues have arisen because we were trying to introduce a new mapping function to aid identification of venues with availability and it hasn’t worked as we’d hoped. 

‘We’re working hard behind the scenes to fix the issues and are really disappointed that we’ve not been able to do so already. We are keeping everyone updated and will continue to do so as the situation evolves.’

Robin Padgham, a private music teacher who spent over three decades working in IT, said that he can ‘see both sides of the situation’. He began trying to book an exam at 8am on Wednesday, and was successful in his booking by 8:30am today (Thursday). 

He said: ‘Twenty-four hours to book one exam is obviously ridiculous, unacceptable, and for me and others like me, not viable.’

ABRSM is the world’s leading provider of music exams and holds more than 650,000 assessments in more than 90 countries every year.

MT will continue to monitor the situation.