Practice for the Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate exam with 15 exam-style practice questions, instant answer reveals, and concise explanations of every correct answer. Topics include: A Generative AI Engineer is developing a system that retrieves news articles from 1918 based on a user's query and gener. Follow @CertPunch and visit certpunch.com for more certification practice exams and study content.
Prefer hands-on? Take this round as an interactive practice test — answer every question, get instant feedback, and see your score: Start the Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate practice test →
What you will practice
- A Generative AI Engineer is developing a system that retrieves news articles from 1918 based on a user's quer…
- A Generative AI Engineer has developed an LLM-based application to provide answers about internal company pol…
- A Generative AI Engineer is working with a language model that responds to customer inquiries about product a…
- A Generative AI Engineer is tasked with building an LLM-based question-answering system that needs to handle…
- A Generative AI Engineer is designing an agent-based LLM system for their favorite monster truck team. The sy…
- A Generative AI Engineer is developing a RAG application that will extract context from source documents in P…
Answers and explanations
Tap a question to expand the answer and the exam reasoning. Try to commit to your own pick first.
Q1. A Generative AI Engineer is developing a system that retrieves news articles from 1918 based on a user's query and generates summaries. While the summaries are accurate, they often include unnecessary details about how the summary was gene…
Answer: D. D. Provide few-shot examples to the model or adjust the user prompt to guide the system toward the desired output format.
Providing few-shot examples or adjusting the user prompt directly shapes the output format and removes unwanted meta-text. Modifying chunk sizes or ingestion pipelines serves retrieval relevance, which fails to address the generation behavior itself.
Q2. A Generative AI Engineer has developed an LLM-based application to provide answers about internal company policies. The engineer needs to ensure the application avoids hallucinating information or leaking confidential data. Which method is…
Answer: B. B. Fine-tune the model on your data, hoping it will automatically learn to avoid inappropriate outputs.
Simply fine-tuning a model on internal data does not guarantee it will prevent hallucinations or automatically enforce data access restrictions. Guardrails, strict system prompts, and explicit permission-based data retrieval are required for security.
Q3. A Generative AI Engineer is working with a language model that responds to customer inquiries about product availability, using the phrases "In Stock" if the product is available and "Out of Stock" if it's not. The engineer wants to classi…
Answer: D. D. You will be given a transcript of a customer call where the customer asks about product availability. Respond with "In Stock" if the product is available or "Out of Stock" if it's unavailable.
The correct prompt clearly defines the decision rule based on availability and constrains the output to the required labels. The strongest distractor adds unnecessary JSON formatting and fields, which introduces complexity and potential hallucination errors.
Q4. A Generative AI Engineer is tasked with building an LLM-based question-answering system that needs to handle newly published documents on a regular basis. The engineer wants to minimize both development effort and operational costs. Which…
Answer: A. A. The system should include a prompt, a retriever, and an LLM. The retriever's output is inserted into the prompt, which is then passed to the LLM to generate answers.
A Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipeline dynamically accesses newly published documents, avoiding the high costs of continuous model retraining. Relying solely on prompt engineering introduces stale knowledge, while utilizing agents introduces unnecessary architectural complexity.
Q5. A Generative AI Engineer is designing an agent-based LLM system for their favorite monster truck team. The system should be able to answer text-based questions about the team, look up event dates via an API, and query tables for the team's…
Answer: B. B. Create a system prompt for the agent listing the available tools, and implement an agent system that runs different calls to handle the queries.
Defining available tools within the system prompt enables the agent to dynamically interact with external APIs and structured tables. Static architectures like basic Retrieval-Augmented Generation lack the operational flexibility required to trigger real-time external lookups.
Q6. A Generative AI Engineer is developing a RAG application that will extract context from source documents in PDF format, which contain both text and images. They aim to implement a solution that requires minimal lines of code. Which Python…
Answer: C. C. Unstructured
The Unstructured library is purpose-built to extract and clean text from complex file formats like PDFs using minimal code. Standard libraries like BeautifulSoup only parse HTML or XML, making them unsuitable for raw document extraction. Rely on Unstructured for efficient data preparation.
Q7. A Generative AI Engineer has received business requirements for an external chatbot. The chatbot needs to understand the types of questions users ask and route them to the appropriate models for answers. For instance, one user might inquir…
Answer: C. C. The chatbot should be designed as a multi-step LLM workflow. First, it should identify the type of question being asked, then route the query to the appropriate model. For questions about upcoming events, the query should be directed to a text-to-SQL model, while ticket purchasing inquiries should redirect the user to a payment platform.
Building a multi-step workflow with an initial intent classification step allows the system to route queries to specialized tools or models. Handling everything in one prompt or splitting into multiple chatbots creates unnecessary complexity. Look for options that describe query routing or agentic workflows.
Q8. A Generative AI Engineer is building a support assistant that answers customer complaints by generating a structured JSON output. The JSON must contain the following fields: {"issue_summary": …, "suggested_action": …, "urgency_level"…
Answer: C. C. "Given the complaint, respond in the following JSON format: { "issue_summary": …, "suggested_action": …, "urgency_level": … }."
Providing an explicit JSON schema directly in the prompt forces the model to adhere to the required structure and field names. Simple conversational prompts fail to enforce machine-readable formats reliably. Always use clear formatting instructions when structured outputs are needed.
Q9. A product team wants to create an internal AI assistant to help software engineers identify root causes of production failures by analyzing logs. The assistant must accept logs and return a diagnosis and suggested fix. How should the Gener…
Answer: C. C. Input: production logs; Output: failure reason and recommended fix
Defining inputs as production logs and outputs as generated diagnoses directly aligns with the stated application requirements. Using historical tickets or database tables reverses the data flow. For exam questions mapping pipelines, strictly match the data sources and desired business outcomes.
Q10. A Generative AI Engineer is developing a RAG application to help clinicians answer complex queries based on clinical research PDFs. These documents include footers, disclaimers, and non-content metadata such as watermarks and legal notices…
Answer: C. C. Pre-process documents to remove disclaimers, footers, and legal sections before chunking.
Pre-processing documents to remove irrelevant noise before chunking ensures the vector database contains only meaningful context. Increasing chunk overlap or expanding context windows simply adds more noise to the prompt. Cleaning raw data is always the first step for reliable retrieval.
Q11. A Generative AI Engineer has created a pipeline that chunks legal documents into structured sections with metadata like clause_id, title, and content_text. The engineer now needs to store this processed data for efficient retrieval using D…
Answer: C. C. Use Spark DataFrame API to write as Delta → Save to managed Unity Catalog volume → Register table in appropriate schema
Using Spark to write chunked data into a managed Unity Catalog Delta table provides ACID compliance and centralized security. Saving files as CSV or Parquet bypasses governance features and lacks time travel. Rely on managed Delta tables for secure RAG infrastructure.
Q12. A Generative AI Engineer has developed a document retrieval system for a pharmaceutical assistant chatbot using scientific articles. They experimented with multiple chunk sizes and retrieval methods but are unsure which configuration yield…
Answer: A,E. A. Use evaluation metrics like Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) or NDCG to assess ranking quality || E. Build a test set of query-answer pairs and compute precision/recall across retrieval strategies
Building a labeled test set and calculating standard metrics like precision provides an objective baseline for comparing retrieval strategies. Rank-aware metrics like Mean Reciprocal Rank measure how well the system orders relevant results. Avoid subjective or isolated component metrics for holistic evaluation.
Q13. A financial advisory firm is deploying a virtual assistant to help users ask questions about their portfolios. The assistant should personalize responses based on the user's risk tolerance, portfolio type, and investment goals. These detai…
Answer: B. B. Inject the metadata fields into the prompt as system context before the user's input
Injecting metadata directly into the system context grounds the model in the specific user profile before it generates a response. Appending metadata as a footnote happens after generation, meaning it cannot influence the highly personalized output you need.
Q14. The business team reports that the LLM responses generated by the customer assistant are overly verbose and repetitive. They want the output to be concise and action-oriented without changing the base model. How should the Generative AI En…
Answer: B. B. Modify the prompt to instruct: "Respond in one sentence. Be direct and actionable."
Explicit prompt instructions directly steer the style and length of the output without requiring any changes to the underlying model. Raising temperature increases randomness and often makes responses longer, while hard token limits risk truncating important information mid-sentence.
Q15. A Generative AI Engineer is tasked with building an application that converts customer service call transcripts into concise, structured summaries that include issue type, sentiment, and required follow-up. Which type of LLM should the eng…
Answer: B. B. A summarization-capable model with support for structured output
A summarization-capable model with structured output support reliably extracts fields like issue type directly from text transcripts. A speech-to-text model is the wrong choice because the audio transcription step is already completed.
More Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate drills and other practice exams are on @CertPunch. New rounds drop every few days at certpunch.com.