There are a lot of pretenders in the IT business and this is at least one way for a customer to tell if a consultant knows anything at all about the product before letting him loose on the installation. It communicates a level of professionalism, which otherwise has to be guessed at. As for excuses, to say that you can pass the examination and still do a poor job, is as true as it is pointless. A doctor can commit malpractice, but it does not then follow that medical qualifications are not necessary to practice medicine. We are all busy and there is no time to take these examinations.
Customers are more important.
That's true, of course, until you run into the customer who asks you what your level of certification is. The fact is, there are many examination centers all over the country and some of them are open on weekends. ESI .splat.txt it doesn't matter, because there is no useful data in it. But no test has so many rogue questions that a competent consultant could not pass the test. You should be able to pass the test by a margin, not one point.