Yes! It is definitely possible for your skill scores to go down, even if you got a pretty good score on an exam. When you take an exam, the QA platform chooses the questions to show you based partially on the score you already have in the skills that the exam covers. Then the platform re-calculates your skill scores based on your performance on those questions.

For example, imagine you had a score of 400 on the skill Storage for AWS before you took an exam. Because that is an intermediate score, the system presents you intermediate- and advanced-level questions relating to the topic Storage for AWS. If you get those questions wrong, the platform adjusts your score of that skill downward. For simplicity in this example, we'll say your score is now 300 (a real exam probably would not reduce your score that much for any individual skill).

Conversely, repeating the same score on an exam might cause your skill score to go up a little. For example, imagine you took an exam and got half of the questions right. If you took the same exam again, got the same questions, and answered the same half correctly, your score might increase slightly as a incentive to keep trying. However, if you had the same performance on the same exam a third time, your score would not go up as much, if at all. 

How Skill Hierarchy Contributes to Your Score

The skills in QA relate to each other in a hierarchy. You can see the hierarchy in your Skill Profile. Try clicking the arrow next to the name of a skill on the left side of the Skills list on you Skill Profile to see the child skills that comprise it. The graphic below shows the Amazon Web Service skill expanded. Tip: You can also click the name of the skill here to drill down to more information.

Each question on an exam relates to a skill, so obviously your performance on that question affects your score for that skill. Less obviously, though, is that your performance on that same question also affects your score for the related skills in the hierarchy.

To continue the previous example, the platform has recalculated your score on Storage for AWS from 400 to 300. The parent skill for Storage for AWS is Amazon Web Services, so after the recalculation, your Amazon Web Services score goes down as well, though not as much. Maybe your Amazon Web Services score would go down only 50 points.

Further Reading

Check our this article on QA's skill assessment technology to find out more.