Grounded answers from school documents only

On Tuesday after school, Ms Wong in academic affairs was replying on WhatsApp: does the school arrange accident insurance for a student entering a inter-school swimming meet? She pasted the whole Co-curricular Activities Guidelines 2026 into a general AI and asked about insurance for swimming. Back came three confident lines — proof of insurance fourteen days before entry, cover of at least one million dollars, parents purchase and submit to academic affairs. All plausible; the guidelines say only that high-risk activities require insurance arrangements, with no fourteen-day rule, no figure, and no named office. She almost pressed send, then checked page two of the PDF.

Grounded prompting is not about whether the AI can read your file. It is about stopping it from filling gaps with things that sound right. This is lesson 13 in module three of the prompt engineering course — admin, RAG and safety — after school administration prompts and before prompt injection.

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Reference material versus sole source

When the model sees your passages, it treats them by default as highly relevant background, not as the only sources it may cite. Everything else it learned from thousands of other schools' documents is still active. If your guidelines are silent on a deadline, it may write "fourteen days before entry" because it has seen that phrase too often elsewhere.

To keep it inside your passages, the constraints need a hard line: use no knowledge beyond the passages provided. "Answer based on the document below" is too weak; the model still treats the document as reference rather than boundary.

Three non-negotiable lines

In practice, grounded prompts collapse to three sentences. Drop any one and leakage follows:

1. Use only the passages I gave you — switch off outside knowledge and "what schools usually do".
2. Every point carries a passage number and a verbatim quote of the key sentence — so a teacher can check, not reread a paraphrase.
3. Say when it is not there — authorise a blank; without this, the model forces the nearest passage to fit.

Why the third line is the one people skip

Teachers often feel "not found" means failure. For admin queries it is a signal: the document is missing a section, you pasted the wrong chunk, or retrieval did not surface the right piece. Had Ms Wong received "not found in the provided documents" for the cover figure and deadline, she could reply to the parent with what the guidelines actually state and send the gap to be written in — far safer than sending wrong numbers.

The most valuable moment in grounded prompting is often not what it got right, but where it honestly says your documents fall short.

Prompts you can paste today

School policy query — before replying to staff or parents:

Role: you are a school policy assistant that may cite only the passages provided.
Task: answer the question from the numbered passages below.
Output:
1. "In the documents" — answer point by point, each ending with its passage number and a verbatim quotation in quotation marks of the single most important sentence.
2. "Not found in the provided documents" — the parts of the question the passages cannot answer.
3. "Documents to add" — one line naming what kind of document or section would be needed to answer in full.
Constraints: use no knowledge beyond the passages provided; do not infer or supply what schools usually do; do not press a related but non-answering passage into service. If the whole question is unanswerable, output only "not found in the provided documents". Quotations must be verbatim, never paraphrased.
Question: [                    ]
Passages:
[1] ......
[2] ......

Draft check against policy — before a circular goes out:

Role: you are a consistency checker for school documents.
Task: check every sentence in the draft below against the policy passages provided.
Output: for each sentence — the draft wording, verdict (consistent / inconsistent / not found in the documents), passage number, key policy sentence quoted verbatim. One final line naming what the teacher should fix first.
Constraints: judge only from the passages provided; bring in no outside knowledge. Anything the passages do not cover is "not found in the documents". Do not rewrite the draft — verdicts only.
Draft: [                    ]
Policy passages:
[1] ......

Student-facing notes Q&A — add two more constraints: no exercise answers, nothing beyond what the teacher has released.

How to cut passages that actually get used

Working by hand, how you cut decides whether this works:

• Cut at headings, not at word counts. Keep a section with its subheading so the model knows what the passage is about.
• Put the section name after the number. "[2] Section 1.4 Insurance for high-risk activities" beats a bare [2].
• Paste only three to five relevant passages at a time. In a forty-page PDF the middle is the easiest to overlook; find the relevant sections with a keyword search first, then paste.

Hand-pasting versus RAG

This lesson is "RAG by hand": you choose passages, number them, spot-check. A platform knowledge base handles chunking, retrieval and citation — see knowledge bases and RAG and chunking, reranking and lost in the middle. Both share the same three lines; the difference is who finds the passages. For what belongs in a school knowledge base and how to permission it, see the school knowledge base.

Where this goes wrong

• Accepting paraphrase instead of a verbatim quote. Distortion enters at paraphrase, and a teacher cannot check quickly. Self-check: can you spot-check by comparing one quoted sentence? If not, tighten the constraints.
• Pasting several documents in one prompt. Handbook, curriculum outline and letter templates together, and the model blends sentences into a "new policy". Self-check: does each passage number name its source file? Are you handling one topic at a time?
• Treating a citation as proof the answer is right. The wrong passage may be cited, or the right passage paraphrased badly. Self-check: do outward replies and formal circulars still get human review? Policy answers should not go out unchecked.

Try it once

Time: 10–15 minutes.

Do this: Pick one question staff or parents actually ask about a real school document — activity guidelines, attendance rules, assessment policy. Ask a general AI once with most or all of the file pasted and a single-sentence question. Then run the school policy query template above with only three to five numbered relevant passages.

Deliver: Both answers side by side. On the second, count how many points landed in "in the documents" versus "not found", and list plausible-sounding details the first answer gave that the second refused to invent.

Done when: The second answer has at least one "not found" item, and every "in the documents" point maps to a verbatim line in the passages you pasted within a second. If the second answer still fills every gap, fix the three constraint lines before changing the question.