How to Ask Good Questions on Mentormate

Mentormate’s expert models are designed to support engineering professionals and students with accurate, relevant, and context-aware guidance. To receive the most useful and high-quality responses, users should follow the best practices of prompt formulation.

This document outlines the recommended strategies for asking clear, effective questions that enable the mentor to respond optimally.

1. Ensure Clarity and Precision

Avoid vague or overly broad questions. Instead, define exactly what you want to know and provide the precise area of application.

Less effective: Tell me about contaminated water.
More effective: Explain how sulphate-rich seepage from gold mining operations is treated in South African return water dams using passive remediation techniques.

Rationale: Specificity enables the mentor to generate focused, accurate responses rather than generalized overviews.

2. Give Context

Clarify your background, location, project type, or reason for asking the question. If you are looking for a specific format or need the information within certain limits, mention these explicitly in your query. This allows the mentor to tailor its response to your situation.

Less effective: What’s the difference between tensile and compressive strength?
More effective: I’m preparing a materials selection report for a pedestrian bridge project in the Western Cape. Could you explain the difference between tensile and compressive strength, and advise which types of materials perform best under each, based on local structural design considerations?

Rationale: This improved version provides background (project type and location), purpose (material selection), and scope (application to structural design), allowing the AI mentor to generate a targeted and practical response, potentially including local climate-related factors, and typical material recommendations.

3. Promote Thoughtful or In-Depth Answers

Encourage experts to go beyond basic facts by asking for evaluations, reasoning, or context- based advice. If you need exact content from a document, a mentor may not provide a fully accurate answer. For broader questions involving multiple sources or practices, the expert offers insightful, high-quality advice.

Less effective:Tell me what the National Environmental Management Act says about mine closure?
More effective: Based on South African environmental and mining legislation, as well as international guidance documents, can you advise what considerations are most important for mine closure. Rank your responses in the order of importance, according to your evaluation.

Rationale: Mentormate’s experts synthesize information from various sources to deliver effective, well-informed answers Their responses are not direct extracts from a single document, but rather synthesized insights based on a wide body of reference material.

Summary of Best Practices

Principle	Recommendation
Ensure Clarity and Precision	State exactly what you are asking and define the topic area
Give Context	Add information about your background, location, or purpose
Promote Thoughtful or In-Depth Answers	Ask for reasoning, analysis, or industry-standard alignment

By following these prompt engineering guidelines, users will maximize the value they receive from the Mentormate platform and ensure more intelligent, accurate, and context-specific guidance from the mentors.