CCAO-F cheat sheet
The distinctions and lists worth holding in memory the morning of the exam.
Exam facts
| Questions | 60 | Time | 120 minutes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pass mark | 720 / 1000 scaled | Validity | 12 months |
| Heaviest domain | Output Evaluation, 21% | Lightest | Troubleshooting, 10% |
Domain weights in order
| Weight | Domain |
|---|---|
| 21% | Output Evaluation and Validation |
| 16% | Workflow Integration and Solution Design |
| 15% | Governance, Risk, and Responsible Use |
| 14% | Prompting and Task Execution |
| 12% | Product and Model Selection |
| 12% | Configuration and Knowledge Management |
| 10% | Troubleshooting and Optimisation |
Which feature for which job
| Need | Feature |
|---|---|
| Recurring task, same background material | Projects |
| Current information from many sources, with citations | Research |
| One or two current facts mid-conversation | Web search |
| Output you will keep, revise or share | Artifacts |
| Material that lives in a work system and changes | Connectors |
| Material that is a fixed document | File upload |
| A sensitive one-off you do not want retained | Incognito chat |
| Team members need the same setup | Shared Project (Team / Enterprise) |
Model tiers
| Tier | Choose it for |
|---|---|
| Haiku | Fast, high-volume, simple work |
| Sonnet | The everyday default for knowledge work |
| Opus | Complex reasoning, long documents, quality-critical work |
| Fable | The hardest reasoning and long-running analysis |
How much verification
| Stakes | Check |
|---|---|
| Internal draft, brainstorm | Read it |
| Shared internally, customer email | Verify every specific claim; check for omissions |
| Published, financial, decision-bearing | Primary sources plus a second reviewer |
| Regulated or affecting an individual | Qualified professional reviews and owns it; disclose AI involvement |
The eight high-risk domains
Legal · Healthcare · Insurance · Financial advice · Employment · Housing and lending · Academic assessment · Journalism. In all eight: human in the loop, and disclosure to those affected.
Data handling
| Consumer plans (Free, Pro, Max) | Training on conversations is opt-in, off by default; if enabled, de-identified retention up to five years |
|---|---|
| Incognito chat | Not saved to history, never used for model improvement |
| Team, Enterprise, API | Customer content not used to train models by default |
| Regardless of plan | GDPR, HIPAA and contractual confidentiality still apply to the data itself |
Six ways to make output checkable
- Give explicit permission to say "I don't know"
- Restrict Claude to the supplied material
- Ask for direct quotes before analysis
- Require a citation for each claim
- Ask it to re-check its own draft and drop unsupported claims
- Ask twice and compare where the answers diverge
Diagnosis quick table
| Symptom | First fix |
|---|---|
| Generic output | Add audience, purpose and specifics |
| Wrong format | State the structure, or give an example |
| Wrong facts | Supply sources; restrict to them; require citations |
| Forgets instructions | Fresh chat with a summary, or move context into a Project |
| Shallow on a big request | Decompose into ordered steps |
| Outdated claims from a Project | Remove the superseded document |
← Previous: The 12 anti-patterns | Next: Questions & answers — Domain 1 →
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