My Preparation to pass the CCA-F exam

TL;DR

You can find the cheat sheet I used to pass the CCA-F exam here.

Background

Anthropic launched its own certification program, with Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCA-F) being the first certification they offer. It is currently exclusive for Anthropic partners and costs $99 per exam.

Directly quoting from their website:

Prove your expertise in building production-grade applications with Claude.

A ~301 level exam for practitioners at partner companies with foundational knowledge who are ready to demonstrate deeper, applied expertise.

As my employer became an Anthropic Partner, I took a shot at completing this certification.

The Exam

Their exam guide provides more detail into what is to be expected.

At a glance

• Format: Multiple Choice with one correct answer and three distractors
• Questions: 60
• Scoring: Scaled score of 100-1,000
• Passing Score: 720
• Time: 120 minutes
• Attempts: One attempt with six month delay between retries

Content

The content is spread across five domains with different weightings:

1. Agentic Architecture & Orchestration (27% of scored content)
2. Tool Design & MCP Integration (18% of scored content)
3. Claude Code Configuration & Workflows (20% of scored content)
4. Prompt Engineering & Structured Output (20% of scored content)
5. Context Management & Reliability (15% of scored content)

Scenarios

The exam uses scenario-based questions. During the exam, four random scenarios will be selected form the following list:

1. Customer Support Resolution Agent
2. Code Generation with Claude Code
3. Multi-Agent Research System
4. Developer Productivity with Claude
5. Claude Code for Continuous Integration
6. Structured Data Extraction

My preparation

Learning Resources

To prepare for the exam, I first took a look at the exam guide. This gave me a feeling for all the topics I would have to learn.

I also went through the curriculum of this website: claudecertificationguide.com
While helpful, the website is clearly vibe-coded and I feel like it misses some topics and also includes some mistakes.

I finally went through the official Claude Code documentation to fill the remaining gaps.

I tried to aggregate the most important information of all these resources into my own cheat sheet.

Mock Exams

To assess my readiness, I took the mock exam provided at claudecertificationguide.com.
I personally found the questions to be quite easy to answer.

CertSafari also offers 614 exam-style practice questions.
For me, these questions were harder to answer and closer to the difficulty of the actual exam.

As a final test, Anthropic also offers a practice exam that contains the same domains and scenarios that will also appear on the actual exam. Their recommendation is to aim for a score of 900/1000.
As the questions are always the same, this exam should only be used as the final exercise before taking the actual one.

Outcome

The preperation did pay off and I passed the CCA-F exam 🥳