CCAR-P · blueprint
Claude Certified Architect — Professional publishes 20 objectives across 7 domains. This is all of them, with the weight each carries and roughly how many of the 63 questions that weight buys.
The weights are the exam's own, not ours. They matter because study time spent proportionally to interest rather than to weight is the most common way a well-prepared candidate still fails: a full mark on the lightest objective here is worth less than a single question in the heaviest.
The question counts are the weight applied to a 63-item sitting. Treat them as the shape of the exam rather than a guarantee: a given sitting varies, and an objective worth 2.4 questions will sometimes ask two and sometimes three.
17.0% of the exam · about 11 of 63 questions · 3 objectives
| Objective | Weight | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Selecting an agentic pattern | 6.0% | 3.8 |
| Drawing system and responsibility boundaries | 5.5% | 3.5 |
| Designing for scale and partial failure | 5.5% | 3.5 |
13.0% of the exam · about 8 of 63 questions · 3 objectives
| Objective | Weight | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Managing the context budget | 4.5% | 2.8 |
| Retrieval and grounding strategy | 4.5% | 2.8 |
| Routing work across models | 4.0% | 2.5 |
19.0% of the exam · about 12 of 63 questions · 3 objectives
| Objective | Weight | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| MCP servers: scope, auth and discovery | 6.5% | 4.1 |
| Tool and function design | 6.5% | 4.1 |
| Integrating with systems of record | 6.0% | 3.8 |
16.0% of the exam · about 10 of 63 questions · 3 objectives
| Objective | Weight | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Designing an evaluation harness | 6.0% | 3.8 |
| Latency and cost optimization | 5.0% | 3.2 |
| Regression and drift detection | 5.0% | 3.2 |
14.0% of the exam · about 9 of 63 questions · 3 objectives
| Objective | Weight | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Least privilege and credential handling | 5.0% | 3.2 |
| Prompt injection and untrusted content | 5.0% | 3.2 |
| Auditability and incident response | 4.0% | 2.5 |
14.0% of the exam · about 9 of 63 questions · 3 objectives
| Objective | Weight | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Scoping and setting expectations | 5.0% | 3.2 |
| Handover, documentation and ownership | 4.5% | 2.8 |
| Iterating a system already in production | 4.5% | 2.8 |
7.0% of the exam · about 4 of 63 questions · 2 objectives
| Objective | Weight | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code in a team workflow | 3.5% | 2.2 |
| Enabling and supporting adopters | 3.5% | 2.2 |
MCP servers: scope, auth and discovery is the single heaviest objective at 6.5% — about 4.1 questions. Being weak there costs more than being weak anywhere else on this page, and it is worth knowing before you plan a revision week.
Knowing the weights is not the same as knowing where you stand against them. Our CCAR-P bank draws items in these proportions and re-estimates each objective after every sitting, so a scaled estimate accounts for what the exam actually asks rather than for what you happened to practise.