Claude Certified Architect Professional: CCAR-P Exam Guide

Posted on Nov 4 • Originally published at szymonpaluch.com

CCAR-P mock exam (63 questions) Free · no account needed

CCAR-P is Anthropic's advanced architect exam: 63 questions in 120 minutes, $175 per attempt, a pass at 720 out of 1000. Foundations tests how you build agentic systems. Professional tests how you run them inside an enterprise: integration, evaluation, governance and the conversation with stakeholders. Here is the blueprint domain by domain, three practice questions in its style, and how to prepare.

Claude Certified Architect Professional arrived on 23 July 2026, together with the Associate and Developer exams. It is the only professional-level Claude exam so far. I passed Architect Foundations in July and have not sat Professional. So this post rests on Anthropic's official exam guide for CCAR-P, read against the exam I did take, and I say which of the two I am speaking from.

The questions are multiple choice and multiple response, and each one tells you how many answers to select. Pearson VUE proctors the exam online or at a test center. Anthropic's certification FAQ says the exam is available in English and Japanese, and browser translation tools are not allowed. The score report gives your scaled score and the percentage you got right in each domain. Those percentages help you plan a retake. They do not decide the pass, which rests on the total.

The guide recommends three or more years in systems architecture or platform engineering, six months with Claude or a comparable LLM system in production, and experience delivering an end-to-end system from discovery to operation. That is a recommendation. There are no formal prerequisites, Foundations included.

The exam has seven domains. The weights and objectives come from the official CCAR-P exam guide, July 2026 version 1.0, checked on September 29. The names below match the guide so you can compare them directly.

Integration is the largest domain and includes retrieval design and access control. Together, domains 5 and 6 make up 28% of the exam. Preparing for them means explaining decisions beyond the code.

CCAR-P gives more space to integration, evaluation, risk and agreeing requirements with a client. Preparation needs to cover the rationale for a whole solution, followed by how it will be assessed and operated. The Foundations domain list is not enough for that review.

The two overlap on model and prompt choices, tool design and context, and what I learned for Foundations carries over there. Most of that overlap is in the recurring design decisions I collected while preparing for Foundations.

Go straight to Professional if you already lead enterprise deliveries and your week includes security reviews, eval design and steering committees. Start with Foundations if you build agents hands-on but have not yet owned the governance side. If you are unsure which role you are in, four questions that sort the Claude exams by the work you do settle it quickly.

For a partner firm, the tier counts people with a current eligible certificate who also meet the activity requirement. A second certificate for the same person does not increase that count. Choose Professional for the skills a project needs, rather than to count yourself twice toward the partner threshold.

Anthropic’s FAQ, checked on September 29, lists no official Professional mock. The old Foundations mock was retired in the move to Pearson. The CCAR-P guide includes three sample questions. I wrote the three exercises below from its scope. Clients, volumes and measured results are hypothetical assumptions, not accounts of my delivery work or live exam questions.

A healthcare client wants an agent that drafts replies to patient messages. Legal requires that no reply reaches a patient before a clinician reviews it, and the client wants to measure how often clinicians change the drafts. Which design meets both requirements?

Correct: B. The requirement is a hard gate, so it belongs in the workflow, not in the prompt. The queue enforces the review, and logging edits against the draft gives the client its measurement. The confidence threshold lets unreviewed replies through, and a weekly sample checks replies the patient has already read.

Option C is the tempting one, and it fails for a reason worth knowing beyond the exam: a confidence number the model reports about itself is not a calibrated gate.

Three weeks before go-live, the client's head of operations asks for a 99.9% accuracy SLA on an invoice extraction pipeline. Your evaluation set shows 96.4% field-level accuracy, and most errors come from handwritten documents. What should you do first?

Correct: C. The job here is to align the expectation with the evidence. Splitting the number by document type shows where the risk sits, a review path covers the weak segment, and an agreed measurement method makes the SLA testable. Accepting an unproven number and refusing outright both fail the stakeholder. A larger model still needs to be tested against the agreed accuracy measure.

A bank wants to classify incoming complaints into 12 fixed categories and route each one by a fixed rule per category. Volume is 40,000 complaints a month, and the categories and rules rarely change. Which architecture fits best?

Correct: B. Here the categories and routing rules are known, so a single call with constrained output offers a simple baseline. The task does not need an agent choosing its next actions freely. Cost, latency and accuracy still need to be measured on representative data; architecture alone does not guarantee better results. A separate model for every category would also need justification and training data.

After reading the guide, plan work in every domain. The exercises below suggest evidence you can submit for review. This is my proposed study plan, not an official course syllabus. You can use one small project throughout; it does not require real client data.

For that rehearsal, use the free CCAR-P mock from the top of this guide: 63 questions with an explanation for every answer. It follows the guide’s seven domain weights and mixes single-answer and multiple-response questions. Its score uses its own formula, so read it as a map of weak domains, not as a forecast of your result. If you would rather read them first, all 63 CCAR-P questions with answers are on one page, and three are worked through step by step.

Access works the same as for every Claude exam: only through a Claude Partner Network organization. If your employer is not one, I laid out the options for people outside the network and registration requirements.

Members of the Certified AI Consultant Program can take all four Anthropic exams through our partner organization, including CCAR-P. Admission criteria and fees are on the program page.

63 multiple-choice and multiple-response questions in 120 minutes. You pass with a scaled score of 720 on a scale from 100 to 1000.

$175 per attempt, before any partner-tier discount. A retake is charged again, with any applicable partner-tier discount.

No. There is no formal prerequisite, and a Foundations certificate does not upgrade into Professional. They are separate exams with separate fees.

No. The only official practice exam, for Architect Foundations, was retired in the move to Pearson on 30 June 2026, before Professional launched. The official exam guide includes three sample questions with answers and explanations. An unofficial 63-question mock written from that guide is free on this site.

Solution Design and Architecture 17%, Claude Models, Prompting and Context Engineering 13%, Integration 19%, Evaluation, Testing and Optimization 16%, Governance, Safety and Risk Management 14%, Stakeholder Communication and Lifecycle Management 14%, and Developer Productivity and Operational Enablement 7%.

Disclaimer. This post is independent and unofficial. It is not affiliated with, authorized or endorsed by Anthropic. Exam facts come from the Claude Certified Architect Professional exam guide (version 1.0, effective July 2026) and Anthropic's certification FAQ, checked on 29 September 2026. The three practice questions are original and are not drawn from the exam. Claude and Claude Certified Architect are names owned by Anthropic.

No partner employer? Anthropic admits to its exams only people from Claude Partner Network organizations. Join our collective of AI consultants and sit all four exams through our partner organization. See the program · Free practice exam

Originally published at szymonpaluch.com.