Reading a Scenario Prompt

The Claude Certified Architect exam is scenario-based: every question is a short situation followed by four options, exactly one correct. You see 4 of 8 scenarios, scored 100-1000, and you pass at 720.

Most wrong answers aren't knowledge gaps - they're reading gaps. The prompt always tells you which domain it lives in, what constraint must hold, and what it costs when the system fails. Miss any of those three and a plausible distractor will catch you.

This lesson trains one skill: dissect a scenario into domain, constraint, and failure cost before you ever look at the options.

Train your eye to extract three signals from any scenario:

• Domain - which of the five exam areas is being tested. This tells you which mental model applies.
• Constraint - the hard requirement the answer MUST satisfy (e.g. "must be deterministic", "runs in CI", "context resets between subagents").
• Failure cost - what breaks if the constraint is violated (financial, legal, safety, or just a slow report). High cost changes the right answer.

Read the prompt three times if needed - once per signal. The options are designed so the wrong ones satisfy two signals but violate one.