This guide teaches every objective in the official CCAO-F exam guide, one domain per chapter. Use it together with the mock exams, in the order below.
Your first step
Take the 30-minute diagnostic to see where you stand. It shows your strongest and weakest domains; it does not change your readiness score. Then study the domains it marks as weakest, and take Mock Exam 1 within your first week. Guided mode is fine for that first mock: untimed, with rationales at submission. Sit the other mocks after it, timed like the real exam.
After each mock, go through every item you missed and decide why you missed it. It may be a fact you did not know, a trap you fell for, or a question you misread. Then reread the part of the chapter that rules out the option you chose. The test-taking playbook covers how to read items, rule out options and pace yourself.
The Objective Mastery Challenge also has a few items that ask you to put steps in order. The real exam does not use them, since every real item is multiple choice or multiple response.
Cred Farmer's readiness rule
This readiness rule is Cred Farmer's own. Anthropic did not set it, and the official exam guide sets no target for practice scores. The real measure is the readiness score on your Progress page. A score of 90, the Exam-ready band, is our signal that your practice results support booking. It does not predict a pass, and when to book the exam is your decision.
- What counts as a result: your first sitting of each of the five practice forms, guided or timed. It is scored on the items you had not already seen answered in a drill. Re-sits, drills and the diagnostic never count.
- The bands: while those sittings average under the 720 cut, the score stays below 60. From 720 to 799 it cannot pass 89. Only an average of 800 or more, which the page marks Ready, lets it reach 90.
- In correct answers: on a 60-item form, 720 is 42 correct (70%) and 800 is 47 correct (78%). No real exam result has checked this scale, so treat it as a signal and not a promise.
- Everything else: progress on your study path, the objectives your mocks covered and a study streak move the score within its band, never past it.
Neither the score nor the real exam judges domains one by one. Use the domain breakdown on the Progress page to pick what to repair next.
What the tiers mean
Each section carries one of three tier labels. Core and Practice sections make up your study path and count toward your progress. Reference sections sit beside the path, for when you need them.
- Core: this page, the official exam snapshot and the seven domain chapters. Together they teach each exam objective once.
- Practice: the clinics, labs, worked solutions, mastery checkpoint and test-taking playbook. Work through them after the chapters they practice.
- Reference: the flashcards, glossary, cheat sheets, exam-day pages and the 30-day study plan, which puts these steps on a calendar.
Each chapter
Each domain chapter opens with a short summary box. It then takes the official objectives one at a time, in the exam guide's own words. Each objective gets the rule, the key facts, the common traps and a worked example. Links to Anthropic's own documentation at the end of each chapter are optional further reading.