Study Plan

A suggested 4-week plan. Adjust the pace to your experience level — if you already build MCP servers, you may only need the security and governance material plus practice questions.

Tip

The percentages below are the official exam domain weights, so spend your time accordingly: Interactions & Execution (26%) and Security & Governance (24%) together make up half the exam.

1. Week 1 — Fundamentals & Architecture (16% + 14%)

   • Read MCP Purpose & Scope
   • Read Core MCP Concepts
   • Read Interoperability & Value
   • Read Schemas & Structured Data
   • Read Hosts, Clients & Servers
   • Read Model Interaction Flow
   • Hands-on: install an MCP server in a host (e.g. Claude Desktop or Claude Code) and inspect the messages

2. Week 2 — Interactions & Execution (26%)

   • Read Interaction Patterns & Response Handling
   • Read Error Handling
   • Read Tool Invocation Lifecycle
   • Read Protocol Primitives
   • Hands-on: build a minimal MCP server exposing one tool, one resource, and one prompt

3. Week 3 — Security & Governance (24%)

   • Read Trust Boundaries
   • Read Permissions & Consent
   • Read Risk & Safety Controls
   • Read Auditability & Observability
   • Review the official MCP security best practices documentation

4. Week 4 — Use Cases, Ecosystem & Review (20% + review)

   • Read Roles, Responsibilities & Adoption
   • Read Operational Use Cases
   • Read Ecosystem & Portability
   • Complete the Practice Questions
   • Go through the Exam Day Checklist
   • Re-review your weakest domains

Check which spec revision you study

The MCP specification changed significantly in the 2026-07-28 revision (stateless requests, no initialize handshake). Materials written against earlier revisions such as 2025-06-18 or 2025-11-25 describe legacy behavior — always cross-check against the official specification.