CCAR-F: how the exam is dealt
Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCAR-F)
CCAR-F: how the exam is dealt
The Claude Certified Architect – Foundations exam asks one kind of question over and over: given this production system, which design holds up? It is not a recall test about API parameters. Almost every item puts a working system in front of you, breaks something about it, and offers four plausible repairs.
The exam at a glance
- 60
- 120 minutes
- 4 scenarios drawn from a bank of 6
- Multiple-choice and multiple-response; each item states how many to select
- 720 scaled, on 100–1,000
- Proctored — online or test centre, via Pearson VUE
- 12 months from the date awarded
The blueprint
Five domains, weighted. The weights are approximate proportions of scored items, and they are the single best guide to where your study hours belong.
Domain weights
- 27%
- 18%
- 20%
- 20%
- 15%
Domain 1 is the largest single block and Domain 5 the smallest, but the spread is narrow — there is no domain you can afford to skip, and no domain that will carry you on its own.
What the scenario draw means for you
The domains do not distribute evenly across the scenarios either. Prompt engineering and structured output live mostly in the extraction and CI contexts; the multi-agent and support contexts carry orchestration and context management. So the draw moves your domain mix, which is why the practice papers here draw four scenarios apiece rather than dealing a fixed blend.
A study sequence that works
From cold to exam-ready
Read the six scenario briefs first
They are short, and every question you will ever see is framed by one of them. Meeting a scenario for the first time in a practice paper wastes the reading time on orientation instead of on the question.