Ah, Spring is in the air. So are arms, as people new to Salesforce throw them up during Trailhead challenges where they can’t seem to get the hands-on part to pass even though they see the result they expect.

The Trailhead modules and Superbadges are so well organized and written, it may seem like there is an instructor reviewing you submissions, but that would not be practical, profitable, or in the spirit of a cloud platform. The scoring is done by automated tests that are checking that things match exactly as the instructions provided.

The most common cause is that the learner has mis-typed a value provided, usually the API name (i.e., my_variable__c). Runner up to this is the experienced user who is new to Trailhead and uses their own naming conventions rather than following the instructions (been there, done that).

The third common cause is that the module content was updated but the test was not (doesn’t happen that often, but you can tell when there are a bunch of questions on the Trailhead Community about the same problem).

Here’s another I often see. Some of the lessons are re-used between modules and trails, or were once in a different order. Regardless of how it got to be, the instructions may say to create a new playground when one has already been created for the module or trail, and work done previously is required to continue.

A couple of similar issues to the above I have also seen is when there are steps described in the lesson content and the challenge assumes these steps were done in the playground. Alternatively, it is sometimes not clear to new Trail Blazers that the same playground should be used throughout a given module or trail, or they inadvertently select to create a new playground or select the wrong playground. Personally, I use a collection of Developer orgs instead of playgrounds to make it easier to go back and find something I had done previously, but I don’t recommend that for most beginners.

This is not an exhaustive list. If you got through it and still haven’t seen Assessment Complete! +500 points, read through the module from the start as if you had never seen it before. Depending on your input processing style, you may want to wait a day or two. Or post a request for help on Trailhead and be sure to include a link to the lesson and module in your request. And feel free to tag @Scott S Nelson.

HTH

© Scott S. Nelson