How Many Questions on the CCA Exam? 60, Split by Domain

The CCA Foundations (CCA-F) exam has 60 questions, all scenario-based multiple-choice or multiple-response, delivered in a single 120-minute session. That gives you an average of two minutes per question. Confirm the current question count and time limit on the official Anthropic Academy or Pearson VUE page before you register, since exam blueprints do get revised.

Sixty is a small number for an exam that covers five domains, so every question carries weight: each one is worth roughly 1.7% of your raw result. Below is how those 60 break down by domain, what that means for study priorities, and how to pace yourself.

How are the 60 questions split across the five domains?

Anthropic publishes domain weights rather than exact question counts. Applying those weights to 60 questions gives you the expected split; the last column is the exact allocation our mock exam uses.

Domain	Weight	Expected questions	Our mock
D1 Agentic Architecture & Orchestration	27%	~16	16
D2 Tool Design & MCP Integration	18%	~11	11
D3 Claude Code Configuration & Workflows	20%	~12	12
D4 Prompt Engineering & Structured Output	20%	~12	12
D5 Context Management & Reliability	15%	~9	9
Total	100%	60	60

The exact count on your form may differ by one or two per domain because the real exam is assembled from a pool and weights are targets, not guarantees. The shape, however, is stable: Domain 1 alone is more than a quarter of the exam, and Domains 3 and 4 together are another 40%.

What does the split mean for how I study?

A common mistake is spreading study time evenly across five domains. Sixteen Domain 1 questions versus nine Domain 5 questions means a point of improvement in Domain 1 is worth almost twice as much as the same improvement in Domain 5.

Rough guidance:

• Domain 1 (16 questions). Agentic loops, orchestration patterns, sub-agents, hooks. If you get 12 of these right you have banked 20% of the exam. Start with the Domain 1 study guide and articles like stop_reason is the only loop control that matters.
• Domains 3 and 4 (12 each). CLAUDE.md hierarchy, skills, hooks, permission modes; then few-shot design, structured output via tool_use, validation and retries. See Domain 3 and Domain 4.
• Domain 2 (11 questions). Tool descriptions, error handling, tool count, MCP scope and configuration. See Domain 2.
• Domain 5 (9 questions). Context degradation, escalation triggers, error propagation, provenance. Fewest questions but often the trickiest judgment calls. See Domain 5.

If you are already fluent in Claude Code, Domain 3 may be nearly free points and you can shift that time to Domain 1 and Domain 5.

How long is each question, really?

Sixty questions in 120 minutes averages two minutes each, but the questions are not uniform. Some are short: a two-sentence setup and four options. Others describe a full system (a multi-agent research pipeline, a CI review workflow, a customer support agent with escalation rules) and then ask which change is the least bad under a stated constraint. Those can take four to five minutes to read carefully.

A workable pacing plan on the real exam:

1. First pass (about 75 minutes). Answer everything you are confident about. Flag anything that needs re-reading and pick a provisional answer anyway.
2. Second pass (about 30 minutes). Return to flagged items. Re-read the constraint sentence first, then eliminate options that violate it.
3. Buffer (about 15 minutes). Review multiple-response items to make sure you selected the required number of answers.

Our mock uses 90 minutes for the same 60 questions, so it forces a first pass of roughly 60 minutes. If you can finish that with a few minutes left, 120 minutes on the day will feel spacious.

Are the questions single-answer or multiple-response?

Both. Most items are single-answer multiple choice, but the exam also includes multiple-response items where you must select a specified number of options (“choose two”). Read the instruction line every time; selecting one answer on a choose-two item is a mechanical error that costs a full question. More on the format in Is the CCA exam multiple choice?.

What is a 60-question exam really testing?

With only 60 items, the exam cannot test recall of every API parameter. Instead, each question is a compressed design decision. The stem states a goal and one or two constraints; the options are all plausible; the correct one is the design that satisfies the constraints with the fewest downsides. Practising against 1,374 questions in the practice hub is less about seeing “the same” question and more about training that elimination reflex.

Next step

Sit the free 60-question mock exam once, cold, to see how the domain split feels under a clock. Then go to the domain where you lost the most questions; for most people that is the Domain 1 study guide, because it carries the most items.