What the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam actually asks.

• 65 questions in 90 minutes — a shade over 80 seconds each if you spend the time evenly, which you should not.
• 100 USD, and it is a Foundational-level certification, the same tier as Cloud Practitioner.
• 50 of the 65 are scored. The other 15 are unscored questions AWS uses to trial future items. You cannot tell which is which, and they do not count against you.
• 700 out of 1000 to pass, on a scaled score. Because it is scaled, the raw number of questions needed is not fixed and not published.
• No penalty for guessing. An unanswered question and a wrong one score identically, so never leave one blank.

That last point matters more than it sounds. The rational strategy is to answer every question, flag the ones you are unsure about, and come back — rather than spending four minutes on a question that is worth the same as one you can answer in twenty seconds.

• Domain 1 — Fundamentals of AI and ML (20%). Vocabulary and the shape of the field: what training and inference are, supervised against unsupervised, where machine learning is the right tool and where a rule would do.
• Domain 2 — Fundamentals of Generative AI (24%). Foundation models, tokens and embeddings, prompt engineering, and what a large language model can and cannot be relied on to do.
• Domain 3 — Applications of Foundation Models (28%). The largest domain. Retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning against prompt engineering, evaluation, and choosing between AWS services that look interchangeable and are not.
• Domain 4 — Guidelines for Responsible AI (14%). Bias, fairness, explainability, transparency, and the AWS tooling that addresses each.
• Domain 5 — Security, Compliance and Governance (14%). Data protection for AI workloads, access control, and the governance expectations around models and their training data.

Domains 2 and 3 together are just over half the exam. If your preparation time is short, that is where it goes.

• Multiple choice. One correct answer, three distractors. The bulk of the exam.
• Multiple response. Two or more correct answers from five or more options, and the question tells you how many to pick. Partial credit is not given, so identifying three of four correct answers scores the same as identifying none.
• Ordering. Arrange steps into the correct sequence. Common for pipeline and workflow questions.
• Matching. Pair items across two lists — a scenario to a service, a symptom to a cause.

Ordering and matching are newer additions to AWS exams and cause disproportionate anxiety, largely because so little practice material includes them. They are not harder; they are just unfamiliar, and unfamiliarity costs time you do not have. Our question bank contains 19 matching and 10 ordering questions alongside multiple choice and multiple response, specifically so exam day is not the first time you see one.

The most common failure on a foundational certification is not lack of knowledge. It is reading the study material until it feels familiar, and mistaking that familiarity for the ability to answer a question under time pressure. Recognising a concept when you see it explained is a different skill from picking between four plausible services when the question gives you one sentence of context.

Three things that work:

• Learn the distinctions, not the definitions. Exam writers build distractors out of services that sound alike. Knowing what Amazon Textract does is less useful than knowing the cue in the question stem that separates it from Amazon Rekognition.
• Sit a full timed exam before you feel ready. Ninety minutes of sustained decision-making is its own skill, and the first attempt is always the worst one. Better to have it early, against a mock, than on the day.
• Review the questions you got right but guessed. They are the ones most likely to turn into a wrong answer on a differently-worded question. Confidence and correctness are separate things, and only one of them is on the score report.

MockRoom's AIF-C01 room has five distinct 65-question mock exams — 325 original questions in total, each written against the published exam guide, each weighted across the five domains, and each with an explanation for every option rather than just the correct one. Nothing here is harvested from an exam dump, and none of it is real examination content.

Open the AIF-C01 study room