Sat it Monday at a Pearson VUE test center and passed with 965/1000 (720 to pass). Most of what I’ve seen on here is about Foundations, so here’s the Professional. No exam content (it’s under NDA) just format, prep, and what surprised me. Two formats I hadn’t drilled. A yes/no matrix — five statements, judge each independently. And drop-down matching, where you classify each scenario from a shared option set and options get reused. Don’t assume one-to-one mapping. Lots of phase-gate questions. “You’re at this stage — which two things belong here, before the next stage?” Distractors are usually things that legitimately belong later . Knowing what happens when in the lifecycle matters more than I expected. Tactic that actually helped: read the last sentence of the stem first, then read the whole thing. A lot of the middle is context you don’t need, and knowing the ask first tells you what to extract. My biggest weakness, in case it’s yours: I kept picking the pragmatic mitigation over the structural fix. Retries instead of a durable queue. A summarizer instead of not feeding the coordinator raw data. A reconciliation pass instead of collapsing the work into one call. All things I’d genuinely ship, all of which reduce how often the failure happens without stopping it. Writing down “does my answer still let the failure keep being generated?” was worth more than any other single thing I did. Prep: read the official material once, carefully. Do the four prerequisite courses — genuinely useful. Then practice tests until your weak domains show up in the per-domain breakdown. I did about ten. Test center over online. No room scanning, no environment fiddling. Would do it again. Domains that felt heaviest: integration, retrieval, prompt/config, stakeholder, and several fairness questions. Happy to answer anything that doesn’t cross the NDA. submitted by /u/hartmanma
Originally posted by u/hartmanma on r/ClaudeCode