Claude Certified Architect — Foundations · Free practice question 4 of 10
Precision vs recall trade-offs in extraction
Your team uses Claude to extract entities from medical referral letters. After deploying a stricter prompt, precision rose from 86% to 94% but recall dropped from 91% to 78%. The medical reviewers say missing entities is worse than spurious ones because doctors are trained to ignore extra detail but rarely catch omissions. What is the most appropriate next step?
- A.Ship the stricter prompt and start a project to backfill the missing entities with a manual review queue.
- B.Revert to the more lenient prompt and accept the lower precision — recall is the load-bearing metric for this use case.
- C.Run both prompts in parallel and average their outputs.
- D.Train a downstream model to fill in entities the stricter prompt missed.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. Revert to the more lenient prompt and accept the lower precision — recall is the load-bearing metric for this use case.
Why: When stakeholders explicitly state which error mode is more harmful, the deployed configuration should match that preference. Reverting to the lenient prompt is the cheapest correct action; the alternatives either cement the wrong tradeoff or stack complexity on top of a misaligned policy.
More free Claude Certified Architect — Foundations questions
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- Routing scarce human review capacity
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- Prompt caching for repeated context
- Shadow-mode rollout for prompt changes