NCP-AAI Cost, Format & Passing Score: Every Published Fact

The published facts

These come from NVIDIA's own certification page for NVIDIA-Certified Professional: Agentic AI. Everything in this block is stated by NVIDIA; nothing in it is inferred.

Exam name:     NVIDIA-Certified Professional: Agentic AI
Exam code:     NCP-AAI
Price:         $200 USD
Duration:      120 minutes
Questions:     60-70
Question type: Multiple choice and multiple select
Delivery:      Online, remotely proctored
Validity:      2 years from issuance
Recertifying:  Retake the exam
Domains:       10, weighted (see the exam guide)

The passing score: what is and is not known

NVIDIA does not publish a passing score for NCP-AAI. Sites that quote "70%" are applying the threshold commonly associated with other NVIDIA professional exams, and it is a reasonable working assumption — but it is an assumption, and NVIDIA has not confirmed it for this exam. Treat 70% as a planning target rather than a fact, and note that scaled scoring means the raw number of questions you need can move with form difficulty.

The pass rate: nobody has it

NVIDIA publishes no pass rate for NCP-AAI, and no credible third party has one either — certification vendors almost never release these, and a new exam has no accumulated public data to infer from. Any page quoting a specific NCP-AAI pass rate has invented it. This matters more than it sounds: a fabricated pass rate is the number people use to decide whether to book, and the honest answer is that it cannot inform your decision, so something else has to.

What to use instead of a pass rate

The useful substitute is your own score against the actual blueprint weights. A pass rate tells you how a population fared; a weighted per-domain score tells you how you will fare, which is the only thing you were trying to learn from the pass rate anyway. Because the exam is weighted, a flat percentage is also misleading — 60% on a 15% domain costs six marks, while 60% on a 5% domain costs two. Score in marks lost, not in percentages.

Marks lost = (1 - your accuracy) x domain weight

  Agent Architecture (15%) at 60% accuracy ... 6.0 marks lost
  Safety & Compliance (5%) at 60% accuracy ... 2.0 marks lost
  -> same accuracy, three times the damage

Retakes, scheduling and validity

The exam is delivered online under remote proctoring, so you book a slot and sit it from wherever you can satisfy the proctoring requirements — a quiet room, a clear desk, a working camera. NVIDIA does not publish a discounted retake voucher for NCP-AAI, so a second attempt is a second $200. Certification runs two years from issuance, and NVIDIA requires retaking the exam to recertify rather than offering the free online renewal that some vendors do.

Budgeting the whole thing

One clean pass is $200 every two years. A fail-then-pass is $400 in the first cycle. There is no mandatory training purchase — NVIDIA sells courses but the exam does not require them — so the rest of your cost is time. That asymmetry is the argument for measuring your readiness before booking: the fee is fixed and modest, the retake is the expensive mistake, and the retake is the one you can actually prevent.

Exam tip

Pace on 70 questions, not 60. The count varies, and a candidate who paced on the lower bound and got the upper one loses their buffer in the last fifteen questions — which, on a weighted exam, is exactly where a couple of heavy-domain marks can decide the result.