Yes — the Claude Certified Architect – Foundations exam (commonly shortened to CCA-F; the official exam code is CCAR-F) is multiple choice. But that's not the complete answer. The official Exam Guide v1.0, Section 3 ('Exam Details at a Glance'), states the item format in one line: 'Multiple-choice and multiple-response items; each item states how many responses to select.' In plain terms: some questions have one correct answer, and some have more than one — and the exam tells you which, item by item. Assuming every question works like a single-answer quiz is the most common misreading of this exam's format, and it's worth correcting before you start studying.
What "Multiple-Response" Means for How You Answer
Each item on the exam tells you upfront how many responses it wants. A single-response item asks for the one best answer. A multiple-response item asks for more than one, and says so directly in the question stem — something like 'select two.' The guide doesn't state what share of the 60 items are multiple-response, and we're not going to guess at a number it doesn't give. What matters for preparation is the mechanic, not the count: you can't default to 'find the one right answer' on every item. Read the instruction line before you start eliminating options.
Why the Guide's Own Sample Questions Don't Show This
Here's a wrinkle worth flagging directly, because it's probably the source of a lot of confusion about this exam's format. Section 9 of the Exam Guide includes twelve sample questions with explanations — and every one of them is a single-select, four-option item: pick the one correct answer from A through D. None of the twelve published samples demonstrates a multiple-response question, even though Section 3 states plainly, a few pages earlier, that multiple-response items exist on the real exam. Study only from the sample set, and you could reasonably — but incorrectly — conclude the exam is single-answer throughout. It isn't. Section 3's item-format line is the one to trust here, and it's the one we're citing. (We're not reproducing any of the twelve sample questions ourselves — Section 14 of the guide treats exam content, including its sample questions, as confidential.)
The Rest of the Format
The rest of the format, straight from the guide:
- 60 items total.
- 120 minutes to complete the exam.
- Scored on a 100–1,000 scale, with a passing score of 720.
- Built around 4 scenarios, drawn at random from a bank of 6.
- Delivered proctored through Pearson VUE, online or at a test center.
How Your Results Are Reported
You receive a pass/fail result along with a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. Your score report also shows percent-correct by content domain — but per Section 10 of the guide, those domain percentages are informational only. They don't determine whether you pass or fail; that's based entirely on your total scaled score.
Why This Matters for How You Prepare
If you only practice single-answer questions, you're training for half the format. A candidate who's only ever picked one option per question can get caught out by an item that says 'select two' — not because the content is unfamiliar, but because the mechanic is. Reading the response-count instruction on every item, and treating multiple-response items as their own skill rather than a variant of single-answer ones, is worth building into your practice routine deliberately.
Our Practice Questions vs. the Real Exam Format
CCA Practice Platforms is an independent exam-prep resource. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or authorized by Anthropic, and this article is not the official Exam Guide — it's our summary of, and citation to, what that guide says.
Our 400-question practice bank and free 10-question diagnostic cover all five exam domains. As of August 2026, our bank includes both single-answer and multiple-response questions, matching the mixed mechanic described above. Multiple-response items in our bank state how many responses to select — so practicing with us means practicing both formats, not just single-answer recall.