Question Anatomy

The item template

Almost every item on these exams follows the same skeleton:

[Context]      A team / company / role and what they are trying to achieve.
[Constraint]   One or two explicit constraints: cost, latency, compliance, scale,
               reliability, team size, existing stack.
[Signal]       A detail that points to the correct principle
               (e.g., "overnight", "must never", "10,000 documents", "confident but wrong").
[Question]     "Which approach BEST…", "What should the architect do FIRST…",
               "Which TWO actions…" (multiple-response items state the count).
[Options]      3–4 plausible options. Usually:
               • the correct trade-off
               • a correct-sounding but over-engineered option
               • an option that ignores the constraint
               • an option that violates a stated principle (an anti-pattern)

How distractors are written

Item writers produce wrong answers by applying predictable transformations to the right one. Learn to recognise them:

A repeatable technique

1. Read the question sentence first (the last line before the options). Note the qualifier: BEST, FIRST, MOST cost-effective, TWO.
2. Read the stem and underline the constraint and the signal. There is almost always exactly one decisive detail.
3. Predict the principle before looking at options (“this is a batch-vs-realtime question”).
4. Eliminate the constraint-blind and anti-pattern options – usually two of four.
5. Between the remaining two, pick the simpler one that fully satisfies the constraint. Over-engineering is a distractor pattern, not a virtue.
6. Multiple-response: the count is given. Each correct option must independently be right; do not pick options that are only right “together”.
7. Flag and move on after ~2.5 minutes. Return with leftover time.

Worked example

A financial-services team is building a support agent with Claude. Refunds above $500 must never be issued without a human approval. The team proposes adding the rule to the system prompt. What should the architect recommend?

A. Keep the rule in the system prompt and add few-shot examples of correct refusals. B. Implement a pre-tool-use hook that blocks the issue_refund tool when amount > 500 unless an approval token is present. C. Ask the model to output a confidence score and only issue refunds when confidence > 0.9. D. Lower the temperature to 0 so the model follows the instruction deterministically.

Time budget

The reserve is for flagged items and a final check that no item is left blank (no guessing penalty).