Examples of good and bad prompts

To communicate effectively with artificial intelligence tools, it is very important to formulate clear, precise, and contextually rich prompts. A good prompt helps generate high-quality and relevant content, while a poor prompt can result in superficial or inappropriate answers.

Below are examples of good and bad prompts that will help you understand the difference and improve your own formulations.

Topic: Creating teaching materials

❌ Bad prompt:
Write a lesson on learning theory.

✅ Good prompt:
Prepare an overview lesson on the most important learning theories in higher education, including behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Include examples of their application in teaching and relevant academic sources.

Topic: Evaluating academic work

❌ Bad prompt:
Evaluate this text.

✅ Good prompt:
Analyse this term paper in terms of the clarity of arguments, the structure of the text, and the citation of sources according to APA style. Propose concrete suggestions for improvement.

Topic: Creating an evaluation quiz

❌ Bad prompt:
Create a quiz for students.

✅ Good prompt:
Create a quiz of 10 multiple-choice questions related to the content of the course “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” Each question should have four answer options, with the correct answer clearly indicated.

Topic: Preparing a presentation

❌ Bad prompt:
Create a presentation on statistics.

✅ Good prompt:
Create a PowerPoint presentation with the most important concepts of descriptive statistics for first-year students, including definitions, graphs, and examples from research.

Topic: Adapting teaching materials

❌ Bad prompt:
Adapt the text for students.

✅ Good prompt:
Adapt a scientific article on cognitive psychology for students with different levels of prior knowledge so that it contains concise summaries, clear definitions of technical terms, and practical examples.

Analysing good and bad prompts is a key step in developing your skills in working with artificial intelligence tools (for example, ChatGPT, Gemini…). Try to apply what you have learned in your own prompts in order to maximise the usefulness and accuracy of the results obtained.

Actively reflecting on prompt formulation promotes deeper understanding and more effective application of artificial intelligence in education.