AIF-C01 exam format: questions, score and cost
AWS publishes more detail about this exam than most vendors do. Here are the facts.
| Exam code | AIF-C01 |
| Certification | AWS Certified AI Practitioner |
| Level | Foundational |
| Duration | 90 minutes |
| Questions | 65 total — 50 scored, 15 unscored |
| Passing score | 700 on a scaled range of 100–1,000 |
| Price | 100 USD |
| Scoring | Compensatory — you pass overall, not per domain |
| Penalty for guessing | None |
Fifteen questions do not count
AWS includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your result. They are collecting data on candidate questions for future use, and they are not identified on the exam.
Two practical consequences. First, roughly one question in four you sweat over may be worth nothing, so a question that seems strangely worded or unusually hard is not a signal that you are failing. Second, your pacing is 90 minutes for 65 questions — about 83 seconds each — regardless of which ones count.
Compensatory scoring
AWS states the exam “uses a compensatory scoring model, which means that you do not need to achieve a passing score in each section. You need to pass only the overall exam.”
This is the opposite of an exam with per-domain minimums, and it changes strategy. A weak domain can be offset by strength elsewhere. Given that domains 2 and 3 together are 52% of scored content, being strong on generative AI genuinely can carry a shakier performance on the 14% governance domains.
AWS also cautions against over-reading the section-level feedback in your score report, since with only 50 scored questions spread across five domains, each section rests on a small number of items.
Four question types
AWS uses more formats than most:
- Multiple choice — one correct answer, three distractors.
- Multiple response — two or more correct out of five or more options. You must select all correct responses to get credit. No partial marks.
- Ordering — arrange 3–5 responses in the correct sequence.
- Matching — pair a list of responses with 3–7 prompts. All pairs must be right.
The all-or-nothing rule on multiple response, ordering and matching is the thing to internalise. A question where you know three of four correct answers earns exactly the same as one you did not attempt. Because there is no penalty for guessing, never leave anything blank.
Domain weighting
| Domain | Weight |
|---|---|
| Fundamentals of AI and ML | 20% |
| Fundamentals of GenAI | 24% |
| Applications of Foundation Models | 28% |
| Guidelines for Responsible AI | 14% |
| Security, Compliance, and Governance for AI Solutions | 14% |
What is out of scope
AWS lists the job tasks the target candidate is not expected to perform, and the list is worth reading twice because it defines the ceiling of the exam:
- Developing or coding AI/ML models or algorithms
- Data engineering or feature engineering
- Hyperparameter tuning or model optimisation
- Building or deploying AI/ML pipelines or infrastructure
- Mathematical or statistical analysis of models
- Implementing security or compliance protocols
- Developing governance frameworks and policies
If you find yourself learning how to tune a model, you have left the syllabus.
Recommended knowledge
AWS expects familiarity with core services — EC2, S3, Lambda, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker AI — plus the shared responsibility model, IAM, and AWS pricing models. None of that needs depth, but Bedrock and SageMaker appear throughout the exam and are worth genuine attention.
Booking
Book through AWS Certification, at a Pearson VUE test centre or online proctored. The 100 USD price makes this one of the cheapest certifications in this field, and it has no prerequisites.