Last updated July 28, 2026
The A4Q Certified Selenium 4 Tester Foundation exam has 40 multiple-choice questions worth one point each, and you need 26 of them — 65% — in 60 minutes to pass. There is no prerequisite certification. This guide works from the published v3.0 syllabus, and it tells you plainly which parts of that syllabus our own question pool does not yet cover.
40 questions, 40 points — every question is worth exactly one point, so counting questions and counting points is the same thing here.
26 correct answers to pass — 65%. You can afford 14 wrong answers, which sounds generous until you meet the locator questions.
60 minutes, plus 25% — an extra 15 minutes, so 75 in total — if the exam language is not your native language.
No prerequisite certification. Unlike the ISTQB specialist exams, this one does not require a Foundation-level certificate first. You can sit it after an accredited course or as an open exam without attending training.
It does assume you can read code. The syllabus expects basic programming knowledge in either Java with Maven or Python — not software engineering depth, but enough to follow a WebDriver snippet and say what it does.
90 seconds per question. That is comfortable for a definition and tight for an XPath expression against an HTML fragment, which is why speed on locators is worth practising rather than assuming.
Five examinable chapters:
Introduction to Test Automation — why automate, success factors and risks, test automation architecture, and automation metrics.
Automation Web Technologies — the HTML, CSS and DOM knowledge a locator strategy rests on, plus CSS selectors and XPath.
Selenium WebDriver — the API itself: finding and interacting with elements, waits and synchronisation, navigation, windows and tabs, frames, alerts, and Actions.
Maintainability of TAS and Test Scripts — the Page Object Model, keeping a suite readable, and why automated tests rot.
Maximizing ROI on Test Automation — measuring the return on an automation effort, and what to automate first.
A4Q does not publish a per-chapter question count, so nobody can honestly tell you “chapter 3 is worth twelve questions”. What it does publish is the minimum instruction time per chapter, and that is the best official signal of emphasis available: 120 minutes for chapter 1, 180 for chapter 2, 240 for chapter 3, 150 for chapter 4 and 150 for chapter 5 — plus 360 minutes of practical exercises, in Java or Python. Twenty hours in total, and almost a third of it hands on the keyboard. Read that as the syllabus telling you it expects working familiarity, not recall.
We have 240 original questions across 6 mock exams for this certification. They concentrate on chapters 2, 3 and 4 — web technologies and locators, the WebDriver API including waits and synchronisation, and maintainability including the Page Object Model.
They do not yet cover chapter 1 (test automation fundamentals, success factors, architecture, automation metrics) or chapter 5 (maximizing ROI). Two of five chapters, so plan for it: use our mocks to drill the hands-on material, and read those two chapters directly from the syllabus, which is free to download. We would rather say this than let you discover it the morning after the exam.
Locator precision. Given an HTML fragment, pick the CSS selector or XPath that matches exactly one element — and only that element. Practise the awkward ones: attribute prefixes, multiple classes, following-sibling, and walking from a cell up to its row with ancestor::tr.
Waits. The difference between an implicit wait, an explicit WebDriverWait and a FluentWait, why mixing implicit and explicit waits produces unpredictable timeouts, and which ExpectedConditions fits a given symptom — presence is not visibility, and visibility is not clickability.
The three exceptions that mean something. NoSuchElementException, StaleElementReferenceException and ElementClickInterceptedException each point at a different cause and a different fix. Questions describe a symptom and expect the right one.
Context switching. Frames, windows and tabs, and native alerts each need an explicit switch and an explicit switch back. Forgetting to return to the default content is the classic trap.
Selenium 4, not Selenium 3. The syllabus is written against Selenium 4. Older tutorials teach APIs that have changed or gone, and a question bank written for Selenium 3 will teach you the wrong answer confidently.
Twenty hours of instruction is the official minimum, and two weeks at eight to ten hours is a realistic self-study equivalent for someone who already writes some code.
Chapters 2 and 3, the largest block. Do not read about locators — open your browser's dev tools on any real page and write selectors against it until a unique CSS selector and a working XPath come out in seconds. Then work through the WebDriver API by writing a tiny suite: open a page, fill a form, handle a dropdown, switch to a frame and back, accept an alert, and wait explicitly for something slow.
Refactor that tiny suite into page objects — doing it is worth more than reading about it. Then take a focused evening each on chapter 1 and chapter 5 straight from the syllabus: automation architecture, success factors, and how ROI and metrics such as EMTE are framed. Finish with timed full mocks on separate days.
Either. The syllabus uses both as reference languages — Java with Maven or Gradle and TestNG, or Python with pip and Pytest — and the exam does not test language trivia. Pick the one you already read more fluently; the questions are about WebDriver behaviour, not about the language.
Six mock exams drawn from a pool of 240 original questions, each mock 40 questions in 60 minutes at a 65% pass mark — the same format and the same one-point-per-question scoring as the real exam, so your percentage means what it looks like. Every option, right or wrong, carries a written rationale; read the ones you did not pick, because knowing why a distractor is wrong is what transfers.
Start with any of the Selenium Tester mock exams, or read a full mock as a study sheet on its questions and answers page.
Our questions are original, written against the published v3.0 syllabus. They are not real exam questions, and anyone offering you those is offering something A4Q does not release. A readiness bar that works: 80% or better across three different mocks, taken timed — and having actually read chapters 1 and 5, which no mock score of ours can measure.