Claude Certified Associate – Foundations (CCAO-F): exam facts and how to prepare

Each item is multiple-choice or multiple-response, and a multiple-response item tells you how many answers to pick. The exam is proctored and closed book, through Pearson VUE, online or at a test centre: no notes, translation tools or AI assistants. It is offered in English and Japanese. You will not write any code: the questions are about using Claude well at work. Scoring runs from 100 to 1,000 against a fixed standard, not a curve.

It suits people who use Claude every day and set up Claude Projects: operations, marketing, project management, teaching, communications and other knowledge work. Anthropic's certifications page also names partner consultants, sellers and delivery leads. It is explicitly not for developers building on the API or people designing agent systems. Associates hand that work to the Developer and Architect credentials.

There are no prerequisites and no required courses. Anthropic recommends regular hands-on use of Claude at work, a basic grasp of structured problem-solving and workflow design, and a practical sense of Claude's limits, such as hallucinations, context limits and data sensitivity.

Registration is through the Anthropic Partner Academy with a partner email (who can take a Claude certification exam). If your company is a Claude partner, note that the Associate exam does not count toward Claude Partner Network tier eligibility.

Anthropic gives each domain a weight, the approximate share of scored items. It publishes no question counts per domain. Output Evaluation and Validation is the largest at 21%: a fifth of the exam is about checking Claude's work, not producing it.

The CCAO-F exam costs $99 per attempt at list price, and a retake costs the full fee again. Select and Preferred partners get 50% off at checkout, and Global Premier partners 100% off until 31 December 2026. Renewing on time is free. All four Claude certification fees and partner discounts.

You sign in to the Anthropic Partner Academy with your company's partner email, pay there, and then book a Pearson VUE slot, online with a proctor or at a test centre. You need to be 18 or older with a government-issued ID, and online testing isn't open to every country's ID. After a fail you wait 14, 30 and 90 days before a retake (after the first, second and third fail), and you get at most 4 attempts per exam in a rolling 12 months. How to register, step by step.

Anthropic publishes no pass rate. How hard it feels depends on how you already work with Claude.

Our suggested steps: Anthropic publishes no study plan. How long this takes depends on what you already do. If you use Claude at work every day, it can take as little as a few days; if you are new to it, give it a couple of weeks.

1. Step 1Read the official exam guide. New to Claude? Take the free Claude Academy courses such as Claude 101 and AI Fluency first (the free Claude courses).
2. Step 2Practise by domain, starting with Output Evaluation and Validation, the heaviest at 21%. Read why each wrong option is wrong.
3. Step 3Take a timed 60-question mock exam, fix your weakest domain, then book.

The credential is valid for 12 months from the award date, and passing earns a Credly badge. On-time renewal is a free, non-proctored assessment on the Partner Academy, though Anthropic can require the full exam after a substantial update. If it lapses, you sit the full exam again.

If you start building on Claude, the next step is the Claude Certified Developer exam or the Claude Certified Architect exam.

Exam-style questions for every CCAO-F domain, each with an explanation for every option, and timed 60-question mock exams. 20 free questions, the first 5 without signing up. Anthropic has no official practice exam: the old one was retired in the move to Pearson VUE, so the sample questions in the exam guide are its only official practice.

Prefer paper? Download free CCAO-F practice questions as a PDF, each with the answer and why every other option is wrong.