Challenging a Certification exam or renewal assessment item or an assessment lab task

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Microsoft Certification exams, certification renewal assessments, and Applied Skills assessment labs are designed to ensure that candidates who earn and maintain our credentials have demonstrated the required proficiency level across the skill domain. Each Microsoft Certification exam, renewal assessment question, and assessment lab task is carefully reviewed by a panel of technical and job experts for technical accuracy, clarity, and relevance. If you believe that a question on a Microsoft Certification exam or renewal assessment or an assessment lab task is inaccurate, you may request an evaluation of the question or task via the challenge process, designed to help identify and correct problematic questions and tasks. However, even if a question or task are flawed in some way, we cannot assume that you would have answered it correctly if it had not had that flaw, therefore most challenges do not result in a change in your exam or assessment result.

Criteria for accepting a challenge:

  • The certification exam, renewal assessment, or assessment lab must have been taken within the last 15 calendar days (not business days).
  • You are challenging a specific item on the exam or renewal assessment or task on the assessment lab.

Challenges will not be accepted for the following criteria:

  • Challenges to the entire exam, renewal assessment, or assessment lab.
  • Challenges based on study materials (practice tests, study guides, training materials, etc.).
  • Challenges to the appropriateness of a question or task.
  • Submission is more than 15 calendar days (not business days) after the exam was taken.
  • Challenges based on technical issues experienced at a testing center or on Microsoft Learn.
  • Challenges related to being unable to finish the exam or assessment lab as a result of taking unscheduled breaks.
  • Challenges that are not submitted via this process.
  • Challenges to the scoring methodologies (e.g., The bar graph does not represent my actual score.).
  • Challenges to the exam, renewal assessment, or assessment lab format (standard, sort, adaptive).
  • Challenges to beta exams.

Challenge process:

  1. Review our criteria for accepting and not accepting a challenge.
  2. Complete and submit the challenge form.
  3. The Microsoft Credentialing team will review your submission for completeness. If incomplete, you will be asked to provide more information. If complete, the Microsoft Credentialing team will review. A review takes approximately two weeks.
  4. Once the review is complete, you will be notified of the outcome.

Thank you for your interest in helping make Microsoft Certification exams, Certification renewals, and Applied Skills assessment labs as valid and relevant as possible.

If you would like to provide feedback about a Practice Assessment, do not use the item challenge process. Use the Practice Assessment feedback form instead.