We Read the Official Exam Blueprint of 251 Certifications. Here Is What the Vendors Publish — and What They Do Not

If you have ever wondered whether a certification exam has a published format, or what the pass mark for a given exam is, the honest answer has been scattered across 251 vendor pages. This is the same data, in one place, with the provenance of every figure attached.

What vendors publish, across 251 certifications

The dataset covers 47 providers — Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, APMG International, Cisco, CREST, AWS, Adobe, Broadcom, CompTIA, PeopleCert, Google Cloud, ISACA, ISC2, Scrum Alliance, Scrum.org, NVIDIA, Databricks, Snowflake, Fortinet and more — across 7 categories and from Foundation to Expert level.

The seven that publish no numeric passing score

These are the ones worth knowing about, because the "cut score" advice you find online is invented for them.

That is seven of 251 — 2,8%. It sounds small until you realise they include the two credentials people ask about most: the PMP and the AWS Certified Security Specialty. If you are planning a study budget around a "65% pass mark" for the PMP, that number came from somewhere other than PMI.

Twenty-three different passing scores for 244 exams

Collect the published cut scores and the set of distinct values is remarkably small. The most common values cluster in a narrow band, which tells you something about how these exams are constructed:

• 60, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 80, 82, 83, 85 — the mass of the distribution.
• Outliers: 63 (CRT-403), 70 (ITIL 4 CDS), 82 (POPM, RTE), 73 (Salesforce Sales), 75 (Security+ V7 on a 100-900 scale is 750).

The practical reading: if a vendor publishes a percentage at all, it is almost always somewhere between 60% and 85%. That range is a useful prior when you are estimating your own readiness — and a useful warning that any specific figure you read for an exam whose vendor does not publish one is fiction.

The extremes, because they are the memorable ones

Two distributions in the same dataset, and they are wildly different:

An 18-question exam and a 180-question exam are not the same object with a different label. The 10-question end of the range is almost entirely practical or lab-style assessments, and the long-duration end is the same thing: the OSCP is a 23-hour 45-minute practical exam, not a 180-question multiple-choice test wearing an exam's clothes. Any study plan that treats "the exam" as a uniform format is wrong for the edges of this range.

How to use the data

Every certification in the dataset has its own page with the format, the domain weights and the number of free practice questions available, and every figure states whether it comes from the vendor or from our own record. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the page says so rather than filling the gap.

The complete set is browsable in the certification index, and each provider has its own page — for example Amazon Web Services certifications or CompTIA certifications — with the same figures for every exam that provider offers.

Free practice questions for each of these certifications, scored per domain against the official blueprint, are on the same pages. If you are choosing between two exams, the weights in the table are usually more decisive than the headline number: the exam is decided in the domain that carries the most weight, not by the total.