CCAR-P study plan

Your step-by-step plan

1. Read the exam guide and map the seven domains

   Day 1

   Read Anthropic's published exam guide for CCAR-P end to end and write the seven domains on one page with their weights. Note that Integration carries the most weight, and that governance and stakeholder communication each carry as much as the model and prompting domain. Book a provisional exam date so the plan has an end.

2. Draw two systems end to end

   Week 1

   Take two Claude systems you know and draw each as input, processing, output and feedback, then name the architectural pattern each uses and justify it against the simpler alternative. Add the model tier choice, what is cached and what enters the context window at each step. This covers most of Domains 1 and 2 in practice rather than on paper.

3. Audit integration: tools, identity and retrieval

   Week 2

   For one agent, list every tool and credential it holds and cut each one its role does not use. Trace where the user or tenant scope comes from on every call. Then build or inspect a small retrieval pipeline and break it with poor chunking and a stale index, so you recognise each failure by its symptoms. This is the heaviest domain, so give it a full week.

4. Practise evaluation and the what-changed diagnosis

   Week 3

   Build a small evaluation set with a code-based check, a model grader and a few human judgements to validate the grader. Run one change against a baseline, one variable at a time. For every regression scenario you meet in practice, write down what changed before reading the options, until the habit is automatic.

5. Cover governance and the stakeholder domains

   Week 3 to 4

   Sort controls into enforced-in-code and requested-of-the-model, and practise mapping a regulatory obligation to the design choice that meets it. Then rewrite one technical trade-off for an engineer, a risk owner and a sponsor, and walk a past project through discovery, design, handoff, monitoring and iteration, naming the risk at each transition.

6. Practise applied scenarios and read every rationale

   Week 4

   Move to full scenario sets and read the explanation on every option, including the questions you got right. Track which distractor family catches you: a compensating control where a structural fix was available, tuning a component that did not change, or an option that answers a different stakeholder's requirement.

7. Close weak domains, then sit a timed mock

   Week 5

   Use per-domain accuracy to drill the two weakest domains rather than re-reading strong ones. Then sit at least one full timed run to rehearse pacing, and on multiple-response items read how many answers to select before evaluating the options.

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