What happens if I fail the exam?

You can retake it after a 24-hour cooldown, as many times as you need. Retakes are free, and each attempt draws a fresh random set of questions.

How long is a certificate valid?

The Safeguard Certified Practitioner credential is valid for 24 months from issue. The expiry date is printed on the certificate and shown live on its public verification page. Renewing means passing the current exam again.

Courses

Reducing False Positives: Precision, Triage and Trust in Your Findings

AdvancedFree5 modules · 14 lessons · ~2 min

About this course

An advanced course for teams whose scanners are technically correct and practically ignored. You will learn exactly where false positives come from, how to measure precision honestly rather than by feel, and how to triage in a way that closes a whole class of finding rather than one ticket. The course treats trust as the scarce resource: a tool engineers stop reading is worse than no tool.

What you'll learn

Where False Positives Come From

The Anatomy of a False Positive: Definitions and Why It Matters
Six Root Causes, Part One: Pattern Matching Without Context and Version Range Mismatches
Six Root Causes, Part Two: Vendored Code, Test Fixtures, Dead Paths and Transitive Attribution

Measuring Precision Honestly

Precision, Recall and the Cost of Being Wrong in Either Direction
Building a Defensible Ground-Truth Sample
Tracking Precision by Scanner, Rule and Time

The Triage Workflow That Closes a Class

Triage as Root-Cause Analysis, Not Ticket Closing
A Repeatable Triage Script: The Decision Sequence, Worked
AutoTriage and Cross-Scanner Deduplication Inside Safeguard

Suppression Governance: Trust as a System

Writing a Suppression That Survives an Audit
Expiry, Review Cadence and Suppression Drift
The Cost of a Noisy Tool: When Engineers Stop Reading

Case Studies and Program Design

Worked Case: The Obvious Answer That Was Wrong
Designing a False-Positive Reduction Program End to End

01Where False Positives Come From3 lessons

The Anatomy of a False Positive: Definitions and Why It Matters
Six Root Causes, Part One: Pattern Matching Without Context and Version Range Mismatches
Six Root Causes, Part Two: Vendored Code, Test Fixtures, Dead Paths and Transitive Attribution

02Measuring Precision Honestly3 lessons

Common questions

How much does Safeguard Academy cost?

Nothing. Every course, exam, and certificate on the catalog is free — including retakes. All you need is a free Safeguard account.

What are the prerequisites?

None. The flagship course, Safeguard Certified Practitioner, is a beginner-level course — basic familiarity with how software is built helps, but every exam question is answerable from the lessons themselves.