What this guide is sure about

What you will be able to do

• Separate the exam facts taken from the official exam guide from the service material checked against AWS documentation
• Explain why this guide publishes no raw pass percentage and no per-domain item counts
• Name the topics in this course that are version-sensitive and know what to re-check for each
• Recognise where AWS's own exam-guide pages disagree, and which of them this guide follows
• Use the exam guide and AWS documentation as the authorities this guide defers to

Every study guide has a boundary where checked fact turns into reasonable inference, and most never tell you where it sits. This lesson draws that line for this course. It is the least interesting lesson here and the one worth reading before you lean on the other thirty-nine, because you are about to spend several weeks on material describing a product surface that has been renamed, superseded or closed to new customers repeatedly in the last two years.

What is verified, and from where#

Two kinds of claim run through this course, and they have different provenance.

The exam facts come from the official AIF-C01 exam guide, version 1.1, published 30 April 2026. That covers the exam code, the 65 items on the paper of which 50 are scored and 15 are unscored trial items that are not identified as such, the 90-minute limit, the four question formats of multiple choice, multiple response, ordering and matching, the absence of partial credit in any of them, the scale of 100 to 1,000 with 700 to pass, compensatory scoring, the fee of 100 USD, the three-year validity, the absence of any prerequisite, and the five domain weights of 20, 24, 28, 14 and 14 per cent. The in-scope and out-of-scope service lists and the seven objectives added in v1.1 come from the same guide. None of that is inferred, and all of it can change in a later revision, which is why lesson 3 tells you to read the revision history yourself.

The service material was checked against AWS's own documentation at docs.aws.amazon.com and aws.amazon.com. Product names, what each service is for, component names, status notices and the supported lists reproduced in the domain modules were verified there rather than written from memory or carried across from older courseware.

What this guide deliberately does not claim#

Four things a reader reasonably wants are missing from this course on purpose. Each absence is a decision rather than an oversight.

The raw percentage needed to pass#

Lesson 1 says that 700 is a scaled score rather than a percentage and then stops. That is the whole honest answer, and here the missing number is unknowable twice over. Scaling exists so that a result means the same thing across different forms of the exam, so a slightly harder form needs slightly fewer correct answers to reach 700 than an easier one does. On top of that, 15 of the 65 items you answer are unscored trial items you cannot identify, so even your own count of correct answers is not the number the scale is built from. AWS publishes 700 and nothing else. Anyone publishing a raw percentage is guessing at a figure that neither they nor you can ever check.

How many items each domain carries#

The blueprint publishes weights, not counts. Twenty-eight per cent of 50 scored items is about fourteen items if the weights map evenly onto item counts, but AWS nowhere states that they do. Where this course does that arithmetic, in the domain-weight discussion in lesson 1 and in the study allocation in lesson 3, it says out loud that it is arithmetic on a published weight rather than a published count. Treat every item count in this guide as an estimate carrying that caveat.

Which items appear on the exam#

This guide contains no real exam questions. Every practice item and every flashcard in it was written for it, from the published objectives. That is partly an integrity position, since reconstructing live items from candidate recall breaches the agreement you accept before you sit, and partly a practical one: a bank assembled from other people's memories of a rotating pool trains you to recognise phrasings that will not be in front of you.

What AWS Skill Builder currently offers#

Lesson 3 describes AWS's preparation path in the terms AWS uses for it, and deliberately states no question counts, no prices and no free-or-paid status for any individual resource. Those pages could not be read reliably during the check, and the catalogue moves between tiers and gets replaced more often than the exam guide is revised. Open AWS's certification and Skill Builder pages on the day you plan, and work from what is actually there that week.

What is version-sensitive, and what to re-check#

This is the section to come back to. AWS's product surface moves considerably faster than the exam guide does, and several things this course describes have already changed at least once. Each is hedged where it appears in the lessons, and collecting them here means you can check them in one sitting rather than meeting one mid-question.

The four services the exam still expects and AWS has closed#

This is the sharpest tension in the course, and it deserves saying plainly. Amazon SageMaker Clarify, Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor, Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI are each no longer open to new customers. Existing customers keep working service and AWS continues security and availability work, but no new features are planned. All four are still named by AIF-C01 objectives or by the in-scope service list, and the paper is written against the objectives.

Both statements are true at once and you need to hold both. On the exam, Clarify answers bias metrics and feature attribution on a model you trained, Model Monitor answers drift in production, Ground Truth answers labelled training data, and Amazon Augmented AI answers routing low-confidence predictions to a human. Off the exam, none of the four is something to build new work on, and AWS points elsewhere for each. Learn them as the paper's expected answers, and remember that an expected answer is not a recommendation.

Where AWS's own pages disagree#

The check turned up two places where AWS documentation contradicts itself. Neither is anyone's mistake to fix but AWS's, and hiding them would leave you thinking this course is wrong.

The out-of-scope service list. The exam guide's revisions page states that AWS Organizations, AWS IAM Identity Center and AWS DeepComposer, among others, were removed from the out-of-scope list in v1.1. The live out-of-scope page still lists all three. This course follows the live page, because the live list is the artefact the exam is built against, but if you read the revisions page you will believe lesson 2 is wrong about three services. It is a disagreement between two AWS pages rather than an error in either of us.

Objective 4.2.2. The revisions page quotes the v1.1 text of that objective with Amazon SageMaker Clarify in its example list, and the live domain 4 page omits Clarify. This course teaches Clarify in the responsible AI module either way, with its availability status attached, so nothing in your preparation turns on it. It is recorded here because you may run into it.

Where the authority actually lives#

This is an independent study guide. It was checked against primary sources, that check produced findings, and the corrections are in. What it cannot do is keep pace with a product surface that renames and retires services faster than any study guide is revised.

So the order of authority is worth stating plainly. The official AIF-C01 exam guide is authoritative for anything about the exam: the fee, the format, the time limit, the pass mark, the domain weights, the service lists. AWS's own documentation is authoritative for anything about the services. This guide is a study aid that organises both into something you can reason with at the end of a working day, and it is worth what a good study aid is worth, which is a lot right until the moment you need the final word on a fee, a status or a product name.