CCAO-F Prompting and Context Engineering Practice Question
A legal team asks Claude to summarize contracts and cite the exact clause supporting each summary point. Claude produces accurate summaries but cites clauses that do not exist. The contracts are supplied inside <contract> tags in the same message. Which change most directly reduces the fabricated citations?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming confidence scores or extra examples will cure hallucinated citations when the real fix is forcing verbatim grounding plus permission to say 'not found'.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Instruct Claude to quote the exact sentence from the contract for each point and to say 'not found' when no sentence supports it.
Fabricated citations occur when a model is asked to attribute claims without being forced to ground them in source text. Requiring a verbatim quote for each point, plus an explicit 'not found' option when no sentence supports a claim, removes the incentive to invent plausible clauses. The other options either layer metadata over unverified citations, rely on examples alone, or enlarge input without changing the grounding requirement.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the contract length limit so Claude has more space to search for the cited clauses.
Why it's wrong here
The contracts are already fully present inside the tags; adding more space does not help if the model is not required to locate and quote actual text. Fabricated citations arise from generation pressure, not from truncation. The remedy is an instruction that forces grounding and permits 'not found', not a larger input allowance.
- ✗
Ask Claude to rank each citation by confidence so reviewers can skip the low-confidence ones.
Why it's wrong here
Self-reported confidence is poorly calibrated and does not prevent fabrication; a model can be confidently wrong. Ranking citations also assumes the citations exist, which is the very problem. The fix must force grounding in source text, not add a metadata layer over potentially invented references. Reviewers would still be checking fabricated clauses.
- ✗
Add a few-shot example showing a correct summary with a correct clause citation.
Why it's wrong here
A single example demonstrates format but does not constrain Claude to source-grounded content, especially when the contract is long and the relevant clause is hard to locate. Without an instruction to quote verbatim or to admit absence of support, the model can still generate plausible but nonexistent citations. Examples help shape style, not enforce evidentiary grounding.
- ✓
Instruct Claude to quote the exact sentence from the contract for each point and to say 'not found' when no sentence supports it.
Why this is correct
Requiring a verbatim quote ties each claim to text actually present in the contract and gives Claude an explicit escape hatch when support is missing. The 'not found' instruction removes the pressure to invent a plausible clause. This directly targets fabricated citations by making the model ground every point in retrievable source text rather than in inferred references.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Anthropic exam blueprint
This CCAO-F practice question is part of Courseiva's free Anthropic certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CCAO-F exam.