Before you plan to sit it
- Who may registerNot in the exam guide
Certification is open to people at Claude Partner Network organizations, and registration rejects personal email addresses. This is not stated in the exam guide.
“Yes. Certification is available to people at Claude Partner Network organizations. Registration requires a partner email address on a recognized company domain — personal email addresses will not work.”
Partner Academy - PrerequisitesIn the exam guide
No course or prior credential is required, and Professional does not require Foundations. This is about content, not eligibility — see who may register.
“There are no mandatory prerequisites or courses required to sit this exam. The experience above is recommended, not required. The credential is awarded based on exam performance alone.”
Exam guide - Foundations before ProfessionalNot in the exam guide
You may sit Professional without holding Foundations, and Foundations never upgrades into it.
“Foundations is the natural place to start and there's no formal prerequisite, so you can take Professional without holding Foundations. Foundations does not convert or upgrade to Professional automatically.”
Partner Academy - How the exam is scoredIn the exam guide
You are measured against a fixed standard, not against other candidates. 720 is a standard-set cut score on a 100–1,000 scale — it is not 72% correct.
“a criterion-referenced assessment: each candidate is measured against a fixed performance standard, not against other candidates. You pass by demonstrating the knowledge and skills defined in the blueprint, not by outperforming a percentage of peers.”
Exam guide
Every link above was confirmed to resolve on 2026-08-24. Quotations are the source’s own words.
What sitting it involves
In 120 minutes, delivered by Pearson VUE.
Charged on every attempt, including a retake.
A standard-set cut score on a scaled range. It is not a percentage correct.
On-time renewal is free and unproctored; a lapsed credential means the full exam again.
Written against exam guide v1.0 (July 2026).
Per-domain percentages appear on your score report and none of them gates the result.
The guide states that these details are subject to change without notice. Confirm them against Anthropic’s own materials before you book.
35% of this exam has almost no practice material behind it
Blueprint-aligned drills for the four technical domains are already a commodity: several free question sets track the published outline closely and run to a few hundred items each. None of them covers Governance, Safety & Risk Management (14%), Stakeholder Communication & Lifecycle Management (14%) or Developer Productivity & Operational Enablement (7%). Treating this exam as Foundations with harder questions misses more than a third of it.
So the concept cards here lean the other way on purpose: 22 of 41 (54%) sit in those three domains, against the 35% of items they carry. Judgement is not drillable by recall, so the stakeholder cards teach critique — a real decision record, a real service-level table — and name what a flawed version costs you.
The 7 published domains
- 1Solution Design & Architecture17%6 objectives · 5 conceptsapproximately 11 of 63 items — Koko’s estimate from the published weight, not a figure Anthropic publishes
- 2Claude Models, Prompting & Context Engineering13%5 objectives · 4 conceptsapproximately 8 of 63 items — Koko’s estimate from the published weight, not a figure Anthropic publishes
- 3Integration19%8 objectives · 5 conceptsapproximately 12 of 63 items — Koko’s estimate from the published weight, not a figure Anthropic publishes3 objectives with no Anthropic documentation
- 4Evaluation, Testing & Optimization16%6 objectives · 5 conceptsapproximately 10 of 63 items — Koko’s estimate from the published weight, not a figure Anthropic publishes1 objective with no Anthropic documentation
- 5Governance, Safety & Risk Management14%5 objectives · 8 conceptsapproximately 9 of 63 items — Koko’s estimate from the published weight, not a figure Anthropic publishes3 objectives with no Anthropic documentationUnder-served
- 6Stakeholder Communication & Lifecycle Management14%5 objectives · 8 conceptsapproximately 9 of 63 items — Koko’s estimate from the published weight, not a figure Anthropic publishes5 objectives with no Anthropic documentationUnder-served
- 7Developer Productivity & Operational Enablement7%3 objectives · 6 conceptsapproximately 4 of 63 items — Koko’s estimate from the published weight, not a figure Anthropic publishesUnder-served
12 of the 38 published objectives have no first-party technical page behind them at all. We say so and name the nearest substitute rather than filling the hole with somebody’s blog. The Sources tab records each one with the search that came back empty.