Claude Certified Associate – Foundations (CCAO-F) Practice Tests

CCAO-F is Anthropic's certification for people who use Claude as a day-to-day productivity tool: operations, marketing, project management, education, communications, and general knowledge work. The official exam guide (Version 1.0, effective July 2026) is explicit that it is not aimed at API developers or ML specialists. The exam runs 60 multiple-choice and multiple-response items in 120 minutes, costs $99, requires a scaled 720 out of 1,000 to pass, and is delivered through Pearson VUE as an online-proctored or test-center sitting.

Seven domains make up the exam: Output Evaluation and Validation at 21 percent, Workflow Integration and Solution Design at 16, Governance, Risk and Responsible Use at 15, Prompting and Task Execution at 14, Product and Model Selection at 12, Configuration and Knowledge Management at 12, and Troubleshooting and Optimization at 10. Our 197-question CCAO-F practice bank mirrors that weighting, and recent candidates describe the real exam as scenario-judgment questions that cast you as an HR business partner, finance manager, or project manager deciding the sensible Claude move, not product trivia.

The certification is valid for 12 months. Renew on time and it is a free non-proctored assessment on Partner Academy; let it lapse and you retake the full exam at full price. Fail and the retry ladder is 14 days, then 30, then 90, capped at 4 attempts per rolling year. Registration runs through the Claude Partner Network: you need an email on a recognized company domain, personal addresses like Gmail are blocked at checkout, and linking a new company domain can take 7 to 10 business days.

Two things set CCAO-F apart from the other three Claude exams. It is the cheapest at $99 (Developer and Architect Foundations run $125, Architect Professional $175, with partner-tier discounts possible at checkout), and it is the only one that does not count toward Partner Network tier eligibility, so it suits professionals who want to prove Claude fluency rather than partners chasing delivery-program status. Candidates also report the official sample questions understate the difficulty; the real distractors are trickier than the samples suggest.