Free Practice Questions for Isaca AAIA Exam

Human-centered design (HCD) focuses on integrating stakeholder needs, ethical implications, and social impact into AI system development. The AAIA™ Study Guide emphasizes the role of HCD in minimizing negative workforce impacts and ensuring inclusive design.

“Auditors should review whether the AI system design process included human-centered practices—particularly for applications affecting jobs or critical human roles. HCD ensures responsible adoption.”

While feedback collection (C) and impact assessments (D) provide useful context, A directly addresses ethical impact mitigation at the design level.

The confusion matrix is a key performance evaluation tool in machine learning and AI auditing. According to the AAIA™ Study Guide, a confusion matrix presents detailed information about actual versus predicted classifications, allowing auditors to assess accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores.

“A confusion matrix reveals not just how often predictions are correct, but also the types of errors being made—false positives and false negatives—thereby providing a clear view of the model’s predictive reliability.”

Adversarial testing evaluates robustness, group analysis identifies bias across subgroups, and latency testing examines performance speed—not predictive accuracy. Thus, D is the most relevant for ensuring correct predictions.

Imputing missing values using the mean, median, or mode is a common technique to fill blanks in datasets. However, according to the AAIA™ Study Guide, this method introduces a significant risk of information distortion, especially if the data is not normally distributed or if imputed values disproportionately impact underrepresented groups.

“Simple imputation can reduce data variability and reinforce existing biases. It may also misrepresent the true distribution of the data, leading to skewed model outputs.”

Other options (B, C, D) may involve transformations, but they do not inherently cause as much bias or data misrepresentation as A.

The effectiveness of an AI-driven business process—such as categorizing customers for promotional campaigns—depends on how well it supports defined business objectives. The AAIA™ Study Guide recommends validating that AI methodology aligns with intended outcomes as part of performance auditing.

“Effectiveness is best measured by assessing whether the AI logic contributes meaningfully to business goals. Output alignment with organizational KPIs or campaign strategies provides clear evidence of functional success.”

Options A and D support operational resilience and quality assurance. Option C is a privacy technique, not directly tied to effectiveness validation. Thus, B is correct.

Risk assessments identify potential threats and vulnerabilities in AI systems and support the development of mitigation strategies. According to the AAIA™ Study Guide, the main objective is not just identification of risks but to proactively design controls that minimize impact and ensure ethical and regulatory compliance.

“The output of an AI risk assessment should lead to actionable mitigation strategies, supporting the secure and responsible deployment of AI solutions across business processes.”

Options A, C, and D are components of governance and monitoring, but B addresses the core intent of risk assessments.

The integrity of data fed into AI systems is a critical concern. The AAIA™ Study Guide emphasizes that validation and filtration processes are essential to mitigate the risk of data poisoning—an attack that can manipulate model behavior by injecting malicious inputs.

“Data poisoning represents a major vulnerability in AI pipelines. Effective controls include robust validation, filtration, and monitoring of training data sources. These preventive practices are essential to ensure model reliability and security.”

While options A, B, and C are important operational and training measures, only D addresses a technical risk that can directly compromise model outputs and trustworthiness.

The best way to validate the accuracy of a predictive AI system is to use historical testing with past sales data (option D). According to the AAIA™ Study Guide, “historical (or back-testing) is essential for evaluating how well a model would have performed using actual data from previous periods, directly reflecting its predictive validity.” This method reveals any gaps or biases in the model by comparing predictions to known outcomes.

Unit testing, load testing, and sensitivity analysis are useful for technical verification and robustness but do not provide direct evidence of prediction accuracy in real-world scenarios.

Ensuring AI model resilience against external threats involves validating that the model is configured to resist attacks, such as adversarial inputs, data poisoning, or misuse. The AAIA™ Study Guide emphasizes configuration testing as a crucial control to simulate threat scenarios and assess robustness.

“Model configuration testing simulates real-world threat conditions to validate model resilience. This includes testing against adversarial attacks, input manipulation, and exposure of sensitive outputs.”

While access monitoring (C) and anonymization (A) reduce risks, they don’t actively validate model behavior under threat conditions. Therefore, D offers the most effective resilience measure.

In predictive maintenance use cases—such as detecting turbine failure—the most critical concern is identifying as many actual failures as possible to prevent catastrophic events. The AAIA™ Study Guide emphasizes that in such high-risk scenarios, Recall is the most appropriate metric because it measures the proportion of true positives correctly identified.

“Recall is critical in scenarios where missing a positive instance (e.g., a failure) is costly or dangerous. It ensures that most real issues are caught by the model, even at the expense of some false positives.”

Precision measures correctness of positive predictions, specificity measures true negatives, and accuracy may be misleading if the data is imbalanced. Thus, D (Recall) is most appropriate.

Data drift occurs when the statistical properties of input data change over time, impacting the accuracy of an AI model. In this case, the model failed to adapt to recent demand trends, indicating that the data on which it was trained no longer reflects current behavior.

“Data drift leads to performance degradation in AI systems when real-world input data shifts away from training data patterns. Monitoring for drift is essential, particularly in dynamic environments such as retail.”

Although training diversity (A) and outlier detection (D) are relevant to accuracy, only B addresses the temporal misalignment between training data and real-time data. Overfitting (C) would more likely cause poor generalization in other contexts.