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Qualified Associate Exam has Retired

Please note that the Qualified Associate Exam has been retired. Tableau now offers the Desktop Specialist and Certified Data Analyst exams.

Passing the Qualified Associate

How difficult is it to pass the Tableau Qualified Associate certification exam? Here’s my experience:

So what’s the exam like?

• Not everyone passes! I’ve heard from multiple people that they missed a passing score by just a few points. See more discussion of the exam difficulty on this thread: https://community.tableau.com/thread/140621
• I’m pretty sure that each time you take the test you’ll get different questions, but there will be the same number of points for each category. The points per category look like this:

Comments on the Tableau Qualified Associate Certification Exam

• Not everyone passes! I’ve heard from multiple people that they missed a passing score by just a few points. See more discussion of the exam difficulty on this thread: https://community.tableau.com/thread/140621
• I’m pretty sure that each time you take the test you’ll get different questions, but there will be the same number of points for each category. The points per category look like this:

The exam for Desktop 10 has a slightly different point breakdown… 36 questions with 100 total points. The breakdown by topic looks like this:

A bit more on dashboards and mapping. “Statistics” is renamed as “Analytics.” “Field Types & Visual Cues” and “Charts” are now combined into the “Field & Chart Types” category.

• The complexity of the hands-on questions varies somewhat. Don’t sweat it if the first question might take you a while, but don’t sweat it – there are some pretty straightforward questions.
• I used a level of detail calculation to solve one question, but I solved it a different way without using level of detail and got the same result.
• With blends and joins, Tableau defaults to assuming that fields with the same names should be joined together. But if there are small differences in the field names then you’ll have to edit the join criteria or, with blending, you’ll have to edit the relationships.
• The proctor told me that I could use a web browser to look things up during the exam, just as long as I did everything within the virtual machine environment. I found this helpful in answering a couple of the knowledge based questions.
• I scheduled the exam and attempted to take it three times and had to abort due to technical difficulties. I’d estimate these difficulties wasted close to two hours… messing with the initial computer setup, trying to troubleshoot with the proctors, emailing Tableau. Finally I switched to my wife’s laptop rather than my own, and everything worked flawlessly without any troubleshooting.

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My Score

I took the 9.0 exam, completing it in a little over an hour and scoring 93% correct.

Since the knowledge based questions are one point each while the hands-on questions are three points each, I’m guessing I got one knowledge based question wrong for Data Connections and another wrong for Field Types & Visual Cues, and also got one of the hands-on statistics problems wrong.