Accessing Microsoft Learn During Your Certification Exam Now Allowed

I was surprised to see a comment on LinkedIn earlier this week saying that Microsoft had made some changes to the certification exams, whereby you are now able to access the Microsoft Learn site during an exam. This is surprising, but in a lot of ways does make sense,

This change is confirmed by the exam duration and exam experience page on Microsoft Learn, which details some important information on the change:

• You will have access to everything in the learn.microsoft.com domain except Q&A and your profile.
• Extra time has not been added.
• The exam timer will continue as you explore Microsoft Learn content.
• This resource is only available on role-based exams, not fundamentals.
• This resource will be available in the same languages in which the exam is available.

Access to Microsoft Learn is provided through a button the examination application which opens Microsoft Learn in split screen, although you can also switch it into full screen mode:

You can use multiple tabs and access any resource except the Q&A section or your profile and any external links, such as to GitHub, are blocked.

You can see a demonstration of this functionality in the Microsoft Open Book Video.

The purist in me thinks that this is a bad move, but it does also make some sense. The exam duration hasn’t been changed, so you can’t make extensive use of Microsoft Learn or you’d not be able to answer all questions.

Being able to access materials, like Microsoft Learn, is something that you would generally be able to do in your daily work, so memorising all information isn’t something you would be required to do, so doing this for an exam is not reflecting the real world experience of a consultant.

Open book exams will make more sense for some roles or technologies than others; for example, developers may deal with cmdlets, XML nodes or other very technical elements which you would never need to memorise, so the exam being open book reflects how you would work in the real world by knowing the basics and enough to quickly lookup the required element.

For less technical certification exams, like the Dynamics 365 Business Central Functional Consultant Associate, which I passed in 2022 and renewed in 2023, I think that open book is less required, although it looks to be available.