AIF-C01 domain - 16% of the exam

Prompt engineering and evaluation

Prompt engineering and evaluation is 16% of the AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) exam. These are the objectives it covers, each with practice questions, with every answer explained.

Objectives in this domain

Sample question from this domain

Free samplePrompt engineering and evaluationmedium

A team is building an evaluation set to judge whether changes to a customer-support summarisation prompt genuinely improve quality rather than just helping on a few familiar cases. Which two characteristics make the evaluation set a trustworthy basis for deciding that a prompt change will generalise to unseen production inputs? Select TWO.

  • AIt contains a varied spread of input types and difficult edge cases that mirror the distribution of real production traffic. Correct
  • BIt is held fixed across every prompt variant being compared so a change in score reflects the prompt and not the data. Correct
  • CIt is small enough for a reviewer to re-run by hand within a minute after each wording tweak to the prompt.
  • DIt is limited to the inputs that the current production prompt already summarises correctly and cleanly today.
  • EIt is regenerated from the newest variant's strongest sample outputs immediately before each comparison run.
A trustworthy prompt evaluation set must be representative of real input variety and held fixed across variants so score differences reflect the prompt alone. A prompt that works on one example can fail on the next because the example understated the variety of real inputs. An evaluation set predicts generalisation only when it samples that variety, including hard edge cases, and stays constant across variants so any score movement is attributable to the prompt change rather than to a shifting or self-selected dataset.

Why A is correct: Representative, varied coverage is what lets a score on the set predict behaviour on unseen inputs rather than on a narrow slice.

Why B is correct: Holding the set constant isolates the prompt as the only variable, which is required for a fair like-for-like comparison.

Why C is wrong: Convenience and speed are practical but do not make the set representative, so a fast tiny set can still give a misleading signal.

Why D is wrong: Including only inputs the prompt already passes inflates the score and hides the failures iteration is meant to surface.

Why E is wrong: Rebuilding the set from a variant's own best outputs biases the test toward that variant and breaks comparability.

Other domains in this exam

See also the AIF-C01 cert hub, the study guide, and the cheat sheet.

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