Full Mock Exam Walkthrough

You are about to work a full mock exam end to end. The Claude Certified Architect exam is scenario-based: each question gives you a realistic architecture situation and four options, exactly one correct. You see 4 of the 8 reference scenarios, scored on a 100-1000 scale with 720 to pass.

• No penalty for guessing — never leave a blank. An eliminated-then-guessed answer beats an empty one.
• Weight your prep by domain: D1 Agent Architecture 27%, D3 Claude Code 20%, D4 Prompt Engineering 20%, D2 Tool/MCP 18%, D5 Context & Reliability 15%.

For each question below we will read the stem, eliminate distractors, and justify the key. The skill you are building is distractor elimination, not recall.

Most wrong answers on this exam are named anti-patterns. If you memorize the anti-pattern list, you can often eliminate two or three options before you even reason about the correct one.

Top distractors to flag on sight:

• Parsing text for words like "done" to end an agent loop.
• Using an iteration cap as the primary stop mechanism.
• Enforcing critical business rules with prompts alone.
• Same-session self-review and single-pass multi-file review.
• Escalating on sentiment or model self-rated confidence.
• Requiring schema fields that may be absent.

Read every option, mentally tag each against this list, then choose what remains.