CCA Study Plan: 30 Days to the CCA-F Exam, Week by Week

A workable 30-day CCA study plan spends week 1 on Domain 1 (the 27% domain), week 2 on Domains 2 and 3, week 3 on Domains 4 and 5, and week 4 on mock exams and mistake review, with a timed mock at the end of every week so you always know where you stand. At roughly 40 hours total it fits around a full-time job.

The plan below links each block to the specific study pages and practice sets on this site. Exam facts (60 questions, 120 minutes, US$125, scaled 720 to pass) are as of mid-2026; confirm on the official Anthropic / Pearson VUE page before you register.

How is the 30-day CCA study plan structured?

Week	Focus	Study pages	Practice	Weekend checkpoint
1 (days 1–7)	Domain 1 – Agentic Architecture & Orchestration	Domain 1 guide	D1 practice	Mock exam #1 (diagnostic)
2 (days 8–14)	Domain 2 – Tool Design & MCP; Domain 3 – Claude Code Configuration	Domain 2, Domain 3	D2 practice, D3 practice	Mock exam #2
3 (days 15–21)	Domain 4 – Prompt Engineering & Structured Output; Domain 5 – Context Management & Reliability	Domain 4, Domain 5	D4 practice, D5 practice	Mock exam #3
4 (days 22–30)	Weak-domain repair, mistake review, cheat sheet	Cheat sheet, articles behind your mistakes	Mixed practice by weakest domain	Mock exam #4 (day 27–28), then rest

The order is deliberate. Domain 1 comes first because its ideas (stateless loop, sub-agent isolation, prompt vs programmatic enforcement) are reused by every other domain. Domains 2 and 3 share a week because they are both concrete and configuration-heavy. Domains 4 and 5 share a week because both are about what guarantees a behaviour: schema versus prompt, structure versus summarization.

Week 1: what should I do each day for Domain 1?

• Day 1. Skim the Foundations primer if the Messages API, stop_reason or MCP primitives are new to you. Otherwise start Domain 1 directly.
• Days 2–3. Task 1.1 and 1.2: stop_reason Is the Only Loop Control That Matters, Model-Driven Decisions vs Hardcoded Decision Trees, Sub-Agents See Nothing. Do 15 D1 practice questions after each session.
• Days 4–5. Tasks 1.3–1.5: Task tool and allowedTools, programmatic vs prompt enforcement, the five hook types and selecting hook vs prompt by consequence.
• Day 6. Tasks 1.6–1.7: fixed vs dynamic decomposition, named session resume. Finish the D1 practice set.
• Day 7. Timed mock exam #1. Expect a low score on domains you have not studied; write down the per-domain numbers.

Weeks 2 and 3: how do I cover four domains in two weeks?

Give each domain three days plus a shared review day.

Week 2, days 8–10 (Domain 2). Tool descriptions and misrouting (30% Misrouting with Minimal Descriptions), error design with isError and error classification (Structured Errors: 78-95% Recovery vs 15%), tool count and least-privilege scoping, MCP server scope and env-var expansion. Do the D2 practice set.

Week 2, days 11–13 (Domain 3). Config hierarchy and what actually loads (Put Team Standards Where the Team Can Actually Get Them), commands vs skills, path globs on rules, plan mode, and the -p non-interactive flag for CI. Do the D3 practice set.

Day 14. Mock exam #2. Compare per-domain scores with week 1.

Week 3, days 15–17 (Domain 4). Specific criteria over vague adjectives, few-shot calibration (Two Examples Reached 91%), tool_use for guaranteed structure and its limits, semantic validation with corrective retry, Batch API trade-offs. Do the D4 practice set.

Week 3, days 18–20 (Domain 5). Progressive summarization and lost-in-the-middle, escalation triggers and unreliable confidence, structured error context vs generic errors, context degradation and the scratchpad, monitoring and provenance. Do the D5 practice set.

Day 21. Mock exam #3. By now every domain has been studied once, so this score is your first honest estimate.

Week 4: how do I turn mistakes into points?

Days 22–26 are repair days. Open your mistakes list and sort by domain. For each wrong answer, re-read the study article behind it and, in one sentence, write why the option you chose was worse than the correct one under the scenario’s constraints. That sentence is the skill the exam tests: identifying the least bad design, not the perfect one.

Spend the most time on the domain with the lowest mock score, but keep doing 10–15 mixed questions a day from the practice hub so nothing goes stale. Read the cheat sheet on day 26 to catch anything you have not seen.

Day 27 or 28: mock exam #4 under exam conditions, 90 minutes on our mock (the real exam allows 120), no notes, no pausing. Day 29: light review of the cheat sheet only. Day 30: exam day, or rest if your booking is later. The exam-day guide covers pacing and check-in.

Is there a 14-day version of the plan?

Yes, if you can commit 2.5 to 3 hours a day. It keeps the same order and the same checkpoints, just compressed:

Days	Focus	Checkpoint
1–3	Domain 1 (all tasks) + D1 practice	Mock #1 on day 3
4–5	Domain 2 + D2 practice	—
6–7	Domain 3 + D3 practice	Mock #2 on day 7
8–9	Domain 4 + D4 practice	—
10–11	Domain 5 + D5 practice	Mock #3 on day 11
12–13	Mistake review, weakest domain, cheat sheet	Mock #4 on day 13
14	Rest or exam	—

The 14-day plan works for engineers who already build agents or use Claude Code daily. If your first mock is under 50%, stretch back to 30 days rather than adding hours per day; the material needs a few nights of sleep to settle.

Next step

Book a date, then start today with Domain 1 and take the free 60-question mock exam at the end of week 1 as your diagnostic. If you want the hour-by-hour split behind this schedule, see how to split study time by domain weight.