Foundations (CCA-F) · Study Notes · 60 questions · 120 minutes · closed-book, proctored
This is a study companion for the Claude Certified Architect — Foundations exam. The exam tests whether you can make the right architectural call in a realistic production scenario, not whether you've memorized trivia. Five domains, weighted unevenly, cover everything from agent design down to context-window mechanics.
Work through the domains in order below. Domain 1 carries the most weight and underpins the reasoning tested everywhere else — if you only have time for one page twice, make it that one.
60 questions · 120 minutes · $125 USD · pass mark 720 on a 1,000-point scale · credential valid 12 months. Delivered proctored via Pearson VUE or an equivalent online proctor. Four of six possible scenario contexts appear on any given sitting: Customer Support Resolution Agent, Code Generation with Claude Code, Multi-Agent Research System, Developer Productivity with Claude, Claude Code for CI/CD, and Structured Data Extraction.
Autonomy, task decomposition, multi-agent orchestration, and human oversight — the largest single domain on the exam.
→ DWG 02Designing tool schemas, building MCP servers, and choosing between built-in tools and custom integrations.
→ DWG 03Architecture, CLAUDE.md configuration, slash commands and skills, hooks, the Agent SDK, and CI/CD.
→ DWG 04Writing effective prompts, advanced techniques, and designing for structured, evaluable output.
→ DWG 05The context window, multi-agent failure modes, cross-session coherence, and provenance.
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