Claude Certified Architect – Foundations and Professional: both exams, one subscription
Anthropic's architect certification has two exams: Claude Certified Architect – Foundations (CCAR-F) and Claude Certified Architect – Professional (CCAR-P). Alloy's Full membership covers the prep for both — and for the other two Claude certifications, Associate and Developer. If you sit Foundations now and Professional next, the second course does not start with a second buying decision.
The two exams
| Foundations (CCAR-F) | Professional (CCAR-P) | |
|---|---|---|
| Questions | 60 in 120 minutes | 63 in 120 minutes |
| Pass mark | 720 on a 100–1,000 scaled score | 720 on a 100–1,000 scaled score |
| Registration | $125 | $175 |
| Largest domain | Agentic Architecture & Orchestration, 27% | Integration, 19% |
| Domains | 5 | 7 |
Foundations certifies that you can build on Claude: agents driven by stop_reason, Claude Code workflows, grounded context, parseable output, and well-designed tools and MCP servers. Professional certifies that you can take a business problem to a scalable solution across its lifecycle: integration, solution design, evaluation, governance, stakeholders and the operation of what you built. Neither has a prerequisite. The exam registrations are separate from Alloy and are booked with Pearson VUE.
What one membership includes
- A course per exam, built from its published blueprint and teaching only what a numbered objective in the official exam guide asks for — thirteen lessons for Foundations, fifteen for Professional.
- Structured tracks, spaced repetition and weak-area drilling. Flashcards come back just before you would forget them; practice modes answer different questions — where am I thin, where am I fooling myself, can I hold it together for a whole paper.
- Every wrong answer explained, including the options that looked reasonable, with your confidence recorded beside your answer and confident-and-wrong answers collected for their own practice set.
- Full practice exams, and a Coach you can ask anything.
- Hands-on work where a course has it — on Foundations, labs where you build a real agent loop, reviewed against the exercise's acceptance criteria and its common failure modes.
- One readiness figure per course, built from mastery, honest confidence and coverage, so you book each exam when the work says you are ready.
- A monthly credit allowance, usable on any course.
- Notice when something changes. These exams move; when something you have already studied changes, you hear what moved and what it means for your answer.
- Every course that opens while you are a member, and cancellation whenever you pass.
Prices are on the pricing page. Credits you buy on top never expire.
Why one membership fits the architect path
The two exams overlap in method more than in content. Both are scenario-based, both are scored on a total scaled score with no per-domain bars, and both reward the same discipline: match the requirement rather than the most impressive answer, name the layer a problem lives in, prefer the simplest sufficient option, and change an answer only when you can name what you missed. The Professional course assumes the agent control flow and tool use that Foundations teaches, so taking them in sequence means the second builds on the first — inside the same membership.
Start free
Create a free account — no card needed, no trial clock — and take the diagnostic for either exam: 24 questions, about 20 minutes, reporting each domain as questions right out of questions asked. The first two lessons are free on both courses, with their podcasts: for Foundations, the exam-strategy lesson and agentic loops with stop_reason control flow; for Professional, the exam-strategy lesson and splitting a request among Claude, existing systems and people and pricing it before you commit.
Alloy is exam preparation built from the official exam guides — only what the exam asks for.