CCAR-F practice questions
Anthropic · CCAR-F · 200 questions
Original practice questions for the Anthropic Claude Certified Architect – Foundations (CCAR-F) exam, covering agentic architecture and orchestration, tool design and MCP integration, Claude Code configuration and workflows, prompt engineering and structured output, and context management and reliability — framed in civic and municipal scenarios such as city AI pilots, public-health records, permitting chatbots, 311 assistants, courts / clerk workflows, and transit / utilities operations.
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
About the CCAR-F exam
- Exam fee
- $125 USD
- Time allowed
- 2 hours
- Questions
- 60
- Passing score
- 720 (scaled, 100-1,000)
- Languages
- English
- Format
- 60 items (multiple-choice and multiple-response, each item states how many responses to select); 4 scenarios drawn from a bank of 6; closed book, delivered through Pearson VUE either online proctored or at a test centre
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Exam details published by the vendor, checked 20 August 2026. Vendors change fees and formats without notice — confirm on the vendor's own page before you book.
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Agentic Architecture & Orchestration · 54 questions
- A city 311 resident-services desk agent must keep calling MCP tools until the resident's request is fully resolved. Which stopreason should the loop treat as the signal to continue executing tools rather than ending the turn?
- A permitting chatbot calls a parcel-lookup MCP tool and receives zoning details. What must the agent do with that tool result before the next Claude turn?
- A transit rider-alert agent receives ambiguous requests that sometimes need schedule lookup, sometimes disruption status, and sometimes both. How should tool selection be designed?
- A water-utility dispute agent incorrectly ends its agentic loop as soon as assistant text appears, even when a pending tooluse block is present. What is the problem with that approach?
- A court-clerk assistant caps the agentic loop at five iterations as its primary stop rule and often leaves fee-refund checks unfinished. What should architects recognize about that design?
- A housing waitlist helper should keep working until Claude finishes assisting the resident. Which control-flow rule correctly implements that agentic loop?
- A 311 multi-issue agent looks up trash pickup, then needs a second tool for a related pothole ticket. Why must tool outputs re-enter the same conversation between iterations?
- A parks permit agent team proposes checking whether assistant text contains the word "done" to decide when the agentic loop is complete. What should the architect conclude?
- A city policy-research system uses one coordinator and several research subagents. How should inter-subagent communication be routed for observability and error handling?
- A county open-data research system spawns subagents for separate datasets. What should architects assume about each subagent's conversation context?
- A planning-staff coordinator handles both simple zoning lookups and complex multi-source synthesis. How should it choose subagents?
- A library research coordinator assigns several subagents to gather sources for a civic literacy report. What practice best minimizes duplicated source pulls?
- A housing-policy coordinator reviews synthesis output and notices coverage gaps on eviction-prevention programs. What should it do next?
- A transit-equity study agent decomposes corridor analysis into extremely narrow micro-tasks and later misses whole corridors. What risk does that illustrate?
- A public-health literature coordinator collects findings from multiple research subagents before writing for the board. What is the coordinator's primary role at that stage?
- An emergency-management after-action coordinator needs controlled information flow among damage-assessment, logistics, and communications subagents. Which communication pattern should it use?
- A municipal grants coordinator must spawn research subagents during a funding-scan workflow. What configuration is required for that invocation path?
- A permit-research subagent needs prior GIS findings to continue a parcel review. How should those findings be supplied?
- A city council briefing system configures a write-report subagent that must not call refund or payment tools. Which mechanism is appropriate?
- A school-district modernization team finished a shared baseline analysis in Claude Code and now wants to compare two refactoring approaches without losing that baseline. What should they use?
- A clerk e-filing synthesizer subagent must produce a unified summary from web-search and document-analysis specialists. What should the coordinator embed in the synthesizer prompt?
- A water-quality research pipeline must keep source URLs attributable while feeding excerpt text to a synthesis subagent. How should that information be passed?
- A transit planning coordinator needs corridor studies for three routes at once. How can it spawn that work efficiently in one model turn?
- A parks master-plan coordinator writes prompts for research subagents that may discover unexpected trail-usage patterns. How should those prompts be designed?
- A treasury refund agent must not call processrefund until getresident returns a verified resident ID. How should that prerequisite be enforced?
- A city 311 agent receives one resident message covering trash pickup, a pothole, and a billing dispute. How should the agent handle the multi-concern request?
- A housing caseworker must take over when an agent cannot finish a subsidy issue. What should the escalation packet include for a human without transcript access?
- A permitting fee-waiver path can adjust charges only after identity verification. Why is deterministic enforcement required here?
- A court-fee waiver agent must enforce prerequisite gates before filing adjustments. Which approach provides reliable enforcement when prompt guidance has non-zero failure risk?
- A utility shutoff-prevention agent escalates a hardship case to the human desk mid-process. What should the handoff list for staff?
- A public-health benefits agent must address eligibility and an address correction in one resident contact. How should those concerns be investigated?
- A solid-waste billing agent must verify the account before adjusting charges. Why is prompt text alone insufficient to enforce that order?
- A multi-MCP civic agent receives Unix timestamps from one system and ISO dates from another. How should those formats be normalized for reliable reasoning?
- A treasury agent must stop refund tool calls that exceed a policy threshold and send them to human escalation. Which mechanism provides that guarantee?
- A permitting agent must guarantee fee-cap compliance on every adjustment. Why choose hooks over prompt instructions?
- A transit fare-adjustment agent must prevent policy-violating tool calls at runtime. What should interception hooks do?
- A health-clinic agent consumes legacy EMR MCP tools that return numeric status codes. What should happen before the model reasons on those results?
- A housing subsidy agent has business rules that must never be probabilistically skipped. When should hooks be selected?
- A court payments agent pulls mixed date formats from clerk and finance MCP tools. How should cross-system formats be normalized?
- A 311 agent handles cash disbursements and sees a prompt-only rule never to refund over a threshold. Why is that insufficient?
- A city code-review bot must check each changed file locally and then assess cross-file integration. Which decomposition pattern fits best?
- A legacy permitting-system modernization keeps uncovering unknown dependencies during investigation. Which decomposition approach should the team use?
- A school-district test-coverage agent faces an open-ended codebase improvement task. How should it decompose the work?
- A water SCADA companion must review multiple services without diluting model attention. What should the architecture avoid?
- A GIS ETL remediation has stable, known steps that rarely change. When do fixed sequential pipelines beat adaptive decomposition?
- A transit mobile-app rewrite keeps revealing new constraints during investigation. What is the value of an adaptive investigation plan?
- A municipal website accessibility sweep must cover page-level issues and sitewide navigation. Which pattern should the agent follow?
- A county IT engineer paused an overnight Claude Code investigation and needs to continue the same conversation. Which approach resumes the named session?
- A city platform team finished a shared baseline analysis and wants to compare two testing strategies without losing that baseline. What should they do?
- After public-works code changes overnight, an engineer resumes a Claude Code session. What should they tell the resumed agent?
- After a county GIS schema migration leaves prior tool results stale, how should the platform team continue the investigation?
- A library digital team pauses Claude Code briefly overnight and most prior context remains valid. What should they do next morning?
- A fire-inspections refactor needs two data-model options explored from the same codebase analysis. Which session technique fits?
- Treasury MCP schemas rotated overnight during a batch-job investigation. Which continuation is most reliable?
Tool Design & MCP Integration · 36 questions
- A 311 MCP suite exposes lookupcase and getticket with near-identical one-line descriptions, so Claude misroutes calls. What should architects fix first?
- A permits MCP search tool description omits input formats and edge cases, so Claude often picks the wrong search tool. What should the description include?
- A public-health portal has a vague analyzecontent tool that overlaps lab extraction. What redesign best reduces selection errors?
- A housing authority agent relies on one generic analyzedocument tool for extraction, summary, and claim checks. What interface change helps most?
- A transit system prompt says "always search" and overrides careful MCP tool descriptions. What should architects review?
- A court clerk MCP set uses minimal one-word descriptions across similar filing tools. Why does selection stay unreliable?
- A water-billing MCP exposes accountlookup and meterreadhistory. What should each description clarify?
- A parks reservations MCP often confuses group versus individual bookings. What description content reduces ambiguous selection?
- A permitting MCP returns only "Operation failed" with no metadata, so the agent cannot decide retry versus explain. What should errors include?
- A 311 validation error should not be retried in a loop. How should the tool mark it?
- A housing search subagent hits a transient timeout on one source. What error-handling pattern should it follow?
- A utility MCP must distinguish empty meter history from access denial. Which design is correct?
- A court e-filing MCP call fails because the clerk role lacks write rights. How should the tool respond?
- A health MCP source times out mid-fetch after some lab rows arrive. What should the structured error carry?
- A transit fare tool rejects a policy-violating adjustment. How should structured errors steer the agent?
- A solid-waste MCP returns the same generic failure string for every problem. Why is that harmful?
- A synthesis-only civic research agent is given 18 tools including web search and starts mis-calling search. What distribution fix is best?
- A municipal report-writer subagent keeps calling web search instead of synthesizing provided findings. What tool-set change helps?
- A parcel enrichment coordinator must run extractparcelmetadata before any enrichment tools. How can it enforce that first call?
- A clerk extraction workflow must produce a schema tool call rather than free-form chat. Which toolchoice setting fits?
- A housing agent previously used unconstrained fetchurl for policy PDFs. What safer tool design validates civic document sources?
- A civic policy synthesizer often needs quick fact checks but must not get full open-data search rights. What tool-distribution pattern fits?
- A transit ops agent sometimes answers from context and sometimes must call a named MCP tool. What should architects understand about toolchoice?
- A city engineering team wants shared Jira MCP servers for every clone without committing tokens. Where should the MCP config live?
- A developer experiments with a GIS MCP that teammates should not inherit. How should it be configured?
- A permits team finds Claude picking weak Grep guesses instead of the capable MCP search tool. What should they improve?
- County IT needs standard Jira ticket workflows for service desks. What MCP approach fits first?
- A library catalog agent wastes calls exploring collection schemas. How can MCP resources help?
- A transit monorepo configures several MCP servers. What should be true after connection-time discovery?
- Treasury has unique levy calculation workflows no community server covers. When is a custom MCP justified?
- A municipal legacy explorer must find all callers of calculatefee across packages. Which built-in tool fits best?
- A school-district agent must locate test files by name pattern regardless of folder layout. Which tool should it use?
- Edit fails because anchors in a shared utility module are not unique. What should the civic coding agent do?
- A water SCADA helper needs to understand a large legacy tree without loading everything. What built-in strategy fits?
- A court case-management refactor must find usages of wrapper-exported helpers. What search sequence works?
- A parks booking service needs a small, precise change in one handler with unique surrounding text. Which built-in fits?
Claude Code Configuration & Workflows · 40 questions
- A new hire on the city apps team misses coding standards that lived only in a senior's user-level CLAUDE.md. What went wrong?
- A permits monorepo needs package-specific standards without duplicating a giant root file. What CLAUDE.md technique helps?
- A transit repo's CLAUDE.md became an unmaintainable monolith covering testing, APIs, and deploy. What should the team do?
- County IT wants every teammate to receive the same Claude coding conventions automatically. Where should shared conventions live?
- A library team's Claude sessions behave inconsistently across days. How can they verify which memory files loaded?
- A school-district SIS app folder needs module-local Claude notes that should not flood the whole monorepo. What scoping fits?
- A water utility engineer has personal editor preferences and the team has mandatory coding standards. How should they be separated?
- A city team wants every clone to get the same /review checklist for pull requests. Where should the command live?
- A verbose codebase-map skill floods the main municipal chat with analysis noise. How should the skill be configured?
- A destructive-migration skill for a civic database must allow file writes but block shell execution. What frontmatter helps?
- A city deploy skill needs the service name, but engineers often invoke it with no arguments. What frontmatter helps?
- A county engineer wants a personal brainstorming skill that teammates should never inherit. Where should it live?
- A housing authority needs on-demand release notes and always-on coding standards. How should those be split?
- An engineer keeps a personal /scratch helper that must not ship in the city repo. What scope is appropriate?
- Terraform conventions for the water utility should load only when editing Terraform files. What configuration fits?
- Test conventions for a parks monorepo must apply to test files scattered across many directories. What path rule helps?
- Why prefer path-scoped .claude/rules/ over always-on subdirectory CLAUDE.md files for niche GIS conventions?
- The permits API package needs conventions that should apply when working under src/api. What should the team create?
- A civic monorepo's test conventions cut across many packages. Why choose path-specific rules over many subdirectory CLAUDE.md files?
- Projection rules for a GIS package should activate only while editing matching geo modules. What does that illustrate?
- A 45-file library migration on the city platform has unclear sequencing risks. What Claude Code mode should come first?
- A one-line null-check bug in a single municipal fee calculator is already well understood. Which approach fits?
- Discovery across a noisy legacy clerk codebase floods the main chat. How can Claude Code isolate that pass?
- A transit microservice split has several valid architecture options still under debate. What should the team start with?
- After the team agrees on a planned SIS migration sequence, what is the sensible next Claude Code step?
- A clear stack-trace hotfix points to one emergency-dispatch file with an obvious fix path. What should the engineer do?
- A multi-integration permits rewrite could waste weeks if the wrong approach is coded first. How does plan mode help?
- A civic data-migration transform keeps drifting until engineers attach two or three concrete input/output pairs. What lesson applies?
- A utility CSV normalizer should improve through failing cases rather than guesswork. What iterative pattern fits?
- Before building a cache for parcel lookups, the team wants Claude to surface invalidation tradeoffs. What pattern helps?
- Date-and-timezone bugs interact in a clerk scheduler, while lint nits are independent. How should issues be batched?
- Null parcel IDs keep escaping a assessor helper despite vague "handle edges" guidance. What should engineers supply?
- A prose-only brief for a housing ETL transform keeps flipping output formats. What is the most effective fix?
- A civic ETL team wants Claude to implement a mapper with strong behavioral coverage. What should they prepare first?
- City CI must run Claude Code without hanging on interactive prompts. Which flag pattern fits?
- City DevOps wants PR review automation to emit machine-parseable inline comments. Which Claude Code CI pattern fits?
- CI-generated tests for the permitting service keep missing fixture conventions. What should the team put in project CLAUDE.md?
- After Claude Code generates a parks-fee patch in CI, how should automated review be run?
- A housing-portal PR keeps getting the same Claude Code review comments on every re-run. What should re-reviews do?
- CI asks Claude Code to generate tests for a transit fare module that already has a suite. What context should be supplied?
Prompt Engineering & Structured Output · 40 questions
- A city PR bot should flag comments only when claimed behavior contradicts the code. Which prompt approach improves precision?
- DevOps adds only-report-high-confidence wording, yet style nits still flood civic repos. What does that show?
- High false-positive style findings drown out real security issues in city DevOps review. What is the main risk?
- The permitting team wants clearer PR-review prompts. Which design best reduces noise?
- One PR-review category floods the clerk portal team with false positives while its prompt is being rewritten. What should they do meantime?
- Fee-logic review severity keeps drifting between reviewers. What prompt design stabilizes classification?
- Permit validators still over-flag after adding a vague be-conservative instruction. Why?
- Ambiguous 311 routing improves after adding a few worked examples showing why one tool was chosen. What technique is that?
- PR review comments for the water-billing service keep changing shape. How can few-shots help?
- Municipal code review false positives drop after examples contrast acceptable city patterns with real defects. What is being taught?
- Permit PDF extraction struggles when citations are inline in some packets and bibliographic in others. What helps?
- Public-health form extraction leaves empty fields on informal measurements and mixed table/narrative layouts. What should be added?
- Detailed instructions for clerk filing extracts still produce inconsistent fields until examples are added. What does that illustrate?
- After adding few-shots, the parcel-form extractor handles novel layouts it never saw verbatim. What capability is that?
- A clerk filing extractor must return schema-compliant JSON reliably. Which approach is preferred?
- With toolchoice set to auto, Claude sometimes chats instead of extracting permit fields. What should the team do for mandatory extraction?
- Required schema fields for optional permit attributes cause fabricated values. How should the schema change?
- Violation categories for code enforcement keep expanding beyond a fixed list. Which enum pattern helps?
- Mixed document batches for the assessor's office need metadata before enrichment. Which toolchoice pattern fits?
- Strict JSON schemas stop malformed fee extracts, yet stated totals still disagree with line items. What limitation remains?
- Scanned utility bills arrive with messy dates and amounts. What should sit beside a strict extraction schema?
- A parcel extract fails schema checks. How should the retry be framed for correction?
- Parcel retries keep failing because the needed grantor name exists only in an external deed not in the packet. What should the architect conclude?
- Code-review false positives keep recurring for the water-billing service. What structured field helps analyze dismissals?
- Fee extracts pass schema checks but stated totals may disagree with line items. What self-correction pattern helps?
- tooluse already blocks invalid JSON shapes, yet an APN lands in the wrong field. What kind of error is that?
- Multi-page permit packets sometimes list conflicting square footage. What structured signal should the extract include?
- Some extract failures are format mismatches; others lack any source for a required field. How should handling differ?
- Overnight permit-packet extraction is latency-tolerant and cost-sensitive. Which API approach fits?
- Pre-merge CI review for the permitting service must finish before merge gates. Why avoid Message Batches there?
- A batch job for assessor PDFs needs mid-request live MCP parcel lookups. What limitation applies?
- Some oversized assessor packets fail in a batch after chunking. How should failures be recovered?
- Thousands of assessor PDFs are queued for extraction. What should happen before the full batch?
- Batches may take up to about 24 hours, but the clerk SLA is 30 hours end-to-end. What must submission cadence account for?
- Generated CI patches for fee logic need a second look. Which review design is stronger?
- A large multi-file civic PR overwhelms a single review pass. What architecture helps?
- Verification passes for permit extracts need to route human review wisely. What should accompany findings?
- Self-review in the fee-logic generator session keeps defending its own choices. What limitation is showing?
- Cross-file data-flow bugs in a housing-authority PR are missed by single-file comments. Where should that analysis live?
- Subtle authorization bugs in a clerk portal patch were missed by the generating session. What often works better?
Context Management & Reliability · 30 questions
- A long 311 session summarizes aggressively and starts losing dollar amounts and case IDs. What should be preserved separately?
- Verbose work-order tool dumps are bloating the 311 agent context. What should happen before accumulation?
- Aggregated subagent research for a policy brief buries key findings in the middle of a long prompt. What placement helps?
- Downstream context budgets are tight after several research subagents. What should subagents return?
- A multi-issue housing session jumbles IDs, amounts, and statuses across topics. What context design helps?
- A 311 resident explicitly asks to speak with a human. What should the agent do?
- Which triggers should a municipal agent treat as appropriate escalation conditions?
- A city architect wants to route hard cases using sentiment scores and the model's self-reported confidence. What judgment applies?
- A clerk lookup returns multiple residents with similar names. What should the agent do?
- How should a utility replacement agent learn when to resolve a standard meter swap versus escalate exceptions?
- A GIS search subagent fails during a zoning research workflow. What should it return to the coordinator?
- A valid GIS parcel query returns no matching parcels. How should the subagent label the outcome?
- A permit-data subagent hits a transient timeout. What error-propagation pattern is appropriate?
- During multi-source civic synthesis, some topics lack support because sources failed. What should synthesis do?
- Which multi-agent error patterns should a municipal architect reject?
- A sprawling legacy student-information-system exploration keeps losing findings across long sessions. What helps?
- Finding every refund-caller path in a county billing codebase is extremely verbose. What should the main agent do?
- A city codebase agent crashes mid-exploration. How should recovery be designed?
- During a multi-hour municipal codebase tour, context fills with discovery noise. What Claude Code practice helps?
- Before spawning the next wave of exploration subagents, what should the coordinator do with the prior phase?
- A clerk extraction pipeline reports 97% overall accuracy but fails badly on handwritten hardship affidavits. What does this illustrate?
- How should a city monitor error rates even among high-confidence permit extractions?
- Before routing field-level confidence for municipal forms, what should the team do?
- Low-confidence or contradictory fields appear on a digital permit intake. What should happen first?
- When may a municipality safely reduce human review volume on automated extractions?
- Policy research subagents gather citations for a housing brief. What must synthesis preserve?
- Two credible transit reports disagree on ridership. What should synthesis do?
- Open-data findings for a parks briefing omit publication dates. What risk does that create, and what should travel with findings?
- How should a final civic research brief present certainty?
- When synthesizing mixed civic source types, how should financial tables and news articles be rendered?
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