Prompt Engineering Fundamentals
About This Course
This module teaches students how Large Language Models work and how to control, evaluate, and verify their outputs. Students begin by understanding how LLMs generate responses, why they hallucinate, and why confident-sounding outputs can be factually wrong. Students then develop systematic techniques for crafting effective prompts and managing the full context provided to a model, including chain-of-thought reasoning, few-shot learning, role-based prompting, retrieval-augmented inputs, and structured context assembly from multiple sources. Through system prompts, parameter tuning, and prompt chaining, students learn to control model behavior for multi-step reasoning tasks.
Students also learn how to manage what information enters the model's context window, including selecting relevant source documents, structuring retrieval outputs, and maintaining conversation memory across interactions, to produce more reliable and grounded responses. Students learn practical verification techniques such as cross-referencing against source material, testing output consistency across rephrased prompts, using self-critique prompting to surface errors, and building evaluation checklists for verifying outputs across text and image generation.
What You'll Learn
• Explain how LLMs generate responses and identify common failure modes including hallucination and factual inconsistency
• Apply systematic prompting techniques (chain-of-thought, few-shot, role-based) and control model behaviour through system prompts, parameter tuning, and prompt chaining
• Manage model context by selecting relevant source documents, structuring retrieval outputs, and maintaining conversation memory across interactions
• Apply verification techniques including cross-referencing, consistency testing, self-critique prompting, and evaluation checklists.
Entry Requirements
Applicants should possess a relevant (Business, Engineering, or Technology) local Polytechnic Diploma, ITE Technical Diploma / Technical Engineer Diploma / Work-Study Technical Diploma or Degree.
Applicants who do not meet the entry requirements may be considered for admission based on evidence of at least 5 years of relevant working experience or supporting evidence of competency readiness. Suitable applicants who are shortlisted may be required to go through an interview and/or entrance test.