Claude Certified Architect (CCAR-F) Exam Prep: Full Course

Update (July 2026): Anthropic restructured its certification program. This exam is now Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCAR-F), one of four Claude certifications. Proctoring moved to Pearson VUE, the fee is $125, retakes are allowed (14/30/90-day waits, up to 4 attempts per year), and the credential is valid for 12 months with a free on-time renewal. The five domains and their weights are unchanged, so this course still maps 1:1 to the current blueprint.

This is the complete prep course for the Claude Certified Architect - Foundations (CCAR-F, formerly CCA-F) exam: every exam domain, all six scenarios, and a tested exam-day strategy, in one place.

The course maps 1:1 to the official exam blueprint:

Domain 1 (27%) — Agentic architecture & orchestration: the agentic loop, coordinators & subagents, hooks, enforcement, and session state.

Domain 2 (18%) — Tool design & MCP integration.

Domain 3 (20%) — Configuring Claude Code (memory files, slash commands, permissions), plus plan mode and Claude Code in CI/CD.

Domain 4 (20%) — Prompt engineering (explicit criteria + few-shot) and structured output (JSON schemas, validation, retry loops).

Domain 5 (15%) — Context management & reliability.

You'll then dissect all six exam scenarios with a worked question each, and finish with exam-day strategy: distractor anatomy, time budgeting, and the practice-exam score to aim for before you sit the real thing.

Honesty note: the original public exam guide detailed Domain 1 in full; Domains 2-5 are mapped from official Anthropic and Claude Code documentation, kept to what they actually say. In July 2026 Anthropic expanded the program to four exams (Associate, Developer, and two Architect levels), all delivered through Pearson VUE.

Independent study material. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic. You will finish with a clear, confident mental model of how to architect agentic systems with Claude.