Module 06 Knowledge Check
5 questions. Pass mark 4 out of 5. Answer every question before checking the answer key below, then retry after reading the feedback.
1. When the corpus does not contain the answer, the correct behaviour is…
- A. Give the closest plausible answer
- B. Say the information is not available in the sources and stop
- C. Guess with a disclaimer
- D. Return a random chunk
2. Why is 'no answer found' hard to achieve in practice?
- A. Models rarely refuse
- B. Retrieval almost always returns *something*, and the model tends to use it
- C. Users dislike it
- D. It is slow
3. A useful mechanism for refusal is…
- A. Raising temperature
- B. A relevance threshold or check that can return zero usable passages
- C. Longer prompts
- D. More chunks
4. A good 'I don't know' response should also…
- A. Apologise repeatedly
- B. Say what was searched and suggest the next step or human route
- C. List the model version
- D. Return the raw chunks
5. Measuring refusal quality requires test questions that…
- A. Are all answerable
- B. Include questions deliberately outside the corpus
- C. Are very long
- D. Use rare words
---
Answer Key and Explanations
Check these only after attempting every question.
1. B - Say the information is not available in the sources and stop
A well-designed assistant must be able to say it does not know; this is a feature, not a failure.
**2. B - Retrieval almost always returns *something*, and the model tends to use it**
Vector search returns nearest neighbours even when nothing is genuinely relevant - the top result is not necessarily a good one.
3. B - A relevance threshold or check that can return zero usable passages
You need an explicit path where retrieval yields nothing acceptable, rather than always passing the top-k forward.
4. B - Say what was searched and suggest the next step or human route
An actionable refusal keeps the user moving and shows the boundary of the system's knowledge.
5. B - Include questions deliberately outside the corpus
If every eval question is answerable, you never test the most dangerous behaviour: confident invention.
Practical Check
Apply this module to your own work: complete the module activity for *Missing Answers and Refusal Behaviour*, then write one sentence naming what your result shows and one naming what it does not.
Strong Answer Pattern
A strong answer names the task, the evidence used, the check performed, and the remaining limitation. It avoids "proved", "guaranteed", or "always" unless the evidence genuinely supports it.