ACP Autodesk Inventor — is the certified professional exam actually much harder than the associate?
I passed the Autodesk Certified Associate for Inventor last year with an 82% and I'm thinking about going for the Certified Professional. I've been using Inventor daily for about 4 years in a mechanical design role — mostly sheet metal, weldments, and assemblies. The CA exam felt like it tested whether you knew where the commands were and basic part modeling. Is the CP testing the same stuff at a harder level, or is it genuinely different content?
Prep resources for the ACP are thin compared to the CA level. Autodesk's own learning portal has some materials but they're mostly tutorial-style, not exam-focused. I've been doing practice questions from a third-party site and scoring around 69%. My weakest areas are the iLogic and parameter-driven design questions — I use some of that in daily work but not at the level the exam seems to test.
There's apparently a presentation and documentation component involving drawing views, bill of materials, and iParts that catches people off guard. My day-to-day work doesn't involve much drawing production so that's another gap. If anyone's taken the ACP recently: how many iLogic questions came up, and how deep does the BOM and drawing section go?
If drawing production is a gap, spend time in the Drawing Manager specifically on automated view creation, annotation styles, and revision table management. Those topics generate more CP questions than most people expect coming from a pure modeling background.
The iParts and iAssemblies section tripped me up on my first attempt. It's not heavily weighted but there are usually 6–8 questions and if you've never built a table-driven iPart you'll lose all of them. Build two or three from scratch before the exam and it'll make sense.
The jump from CA to CP is real. CA tests recognition — do you know where the tool is. CP tests application — can you solve a design problem efficiently. Give yourself at least 6–8 weeks of deliberate practice before sitting for it.
Passed the ACP last November after failing the first attempt. The iLogic questions on my exam were scenario-based — they give you a situation and ask what rule or parameter setup would accomplish it. Less about syntax, more about knowing when and why to use iLogic versus just driving dimensions manually.
The drawing section had about 12–15 questions on mine. Section views, broken-out sections, BOM item numbering logic — you need hands-on experience, not just conceptual knowledge.
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