Free CCAR-F diagnostic: see where you stand on the Claude Certified Architect – Foundations exam before you study
Take a free 24-question diagnostic for the Claude Certified Architect – Foundations (CCAR-F) exam. It takes about 20 minutes, needs no card, and tells you where you actually stand across the exam's five domains before you spend a week studying the wrong one.
What the diagnostic is
A short sitting built to the shape of CCAR-F. It draws from the same question bank, under the same rules, as the rest of the course — it is not a quiz bolted on the side — so what it reports is where you stand against this exam rather than against a warm-up. Like the exam, it is about decisions: a realistic design and what to do next, or a flawed approach and what fails.
Why it comes first
CCAR-F is scored on one total scaled score — 720 on a 100–1,000 scale — with no separate minimum per domain, and its domains are not equal:
- Agentic Architecture & Orchestration — 27%
- Claude Code Configuration & Workflows — 20%
- Prompt Engineering & Structured Output — 20%
- Tool Design & MCP Integration — 18%
- Context Management & Reliability — 15%
A weak spot in agentic architecture costs you nearly twice what the same weak spot costs in context reliability. The diagnostic tells you which of your weak spots are the expensive ones, and the instinct to revise a little first — so the result is less embarrassing — is the instinct that costs you a week, because a diagnostic taken after a warm-up measures the warm-up.
How it is shaped
- Weighted like the exam. The domains it draws from, and how heavily, follow the exam's published weights.
- Spread inside each domain. It covers different tasks within a domain rather than asking the same thing four times, so a weak result is proportionally expensive rather than one unlucky question.
- Fixed length, one sitting. The course sets its length and Alloy will not shorten it. A partial diagnostic is not a smaller one, it is a worse one: it measures less and still reports with the same confidence.
- A confidence rating on every answer. You cannot submit without it. Alloy watches the gap between how sure you were and how right you turned out to be — certain and wrong is what fails people, because an answer you were sure of never gets re-checked.
What you get back
A starting readiness figure, and each of the five domains reported as questions right out of questions asked, on the summary screen. With 24 questions across five domains, each gets only a handful, so read the counts as a pointer to where to begin, not a precise score. Anthropic treats its own per-domain percentages the same way: informational, never the pass decision.
If you rated honestly, you also get the set of questions you were sure about and got wrong — the highest-value pile to study first.
What to do with the result
- Open your weakest heavy domain first. Agentic architecture, at 27%, is the heart of the credential; if it is weak, start there, and pair the reading with a lab where you build a real loop.
- Run the confident-and-wrong practice set straight after the diagnostic.
- Follow Recommended next when you are unsure what to study; it weighs what you are closest to forgetting, where you are weakest and what carries the most weight that you have not started.
- Leave out what the exam does not test — fine-tuning, computer use, vision, streaming, tokenization specifics, cloud configuration and MCP server hosting are all on its published out-of-scope list.
Mistakes to avoid
- Revising before the diagnostic.
- Rating every answer at the top of the scale — it throws away the signal and buys nothing.
- Treating a handful of questions per domain as a percentage.
- Stopping partway through.
- Studying the domain you already find comfortable because the result made it look close.
What is free
A free account has no card and no trial clock. It includes this diagnostic, the first two lessons of the course with their podcasts — the exam-strategy lesson, on how CCAR-F is scored and how its wrong answers are built, and the lesson on agentic loops and stop_reason control flow — and a place to store and verify certifications you already hold.
Take the diagnostic, then start the free first lesson.
Alloy is exam preparation built from the official exam guides — only what the exam asks for.