AAIR Advanced in AI Risk: 5 Practice Tests, 450 Questions
450 exam-style questions with sourced explanations: governance, AI life cycle, risk program, EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF
Are you ready to sit the ISACA Advanced in AI Risk exam? That is the only question this practice set answers, and it answers it five times over.
Inside are five full-length practice exams of 90 questions each, 450 in total, built to the exam content outline ISACA published for the AAIR credential it launched on 15 April 2026. Every test carries the same domain weighting as the real exam: 33 questions on AI Risk Governance and Framework Integration (37 percent), 19 on AI Life Cycle Risk Management (21 percent) and 38 on AI Risk Program Management (42 percent). Every question is single-answer multiple choice with four options, because that is the only question type the AAIR exam uses. You will not find invented "select all that apply" items here.
AAIR is new, so there is no retired predecessor whose material you can reuse, and that is the trap. Question banks written for CRISC test IT risk without the AI content. Material written for AAIA leans towards audit evidence and AAISM towards security management, both graded against different domains. The AAIR exam asks you to run an AI risk programme: write a usable risk scenario, choose a treatment, select and validate a control, set a KRI threshold, assess a model vendor, respond to an AI incident.
The five tests climb deliberately. Test 1 covers definitions and frameworks. Test 2 puts them to work in short workplace situations. Test 3 gives you two defensible options and one constraint that decides between them. Test 4 goes after exact article numbers, thresholds and taxonomies. Test 5 is the dress rehearsal: 90 questions in 150 minutes, the real clock, domains mixed.
Every answer option carries its own feedback saying why it is right or, if it is wrong, what it actually describes. Every question closes with an explanation and a link to the public source it rests on: NIST, ISO, EUR-Lex, MITRE ATLAS, OWASP or ISACA. Results are reported per domain, so you know which of the three to revise. The pass mark is 80 percent on tests 1 to 4 and 85 percent on test 5, both above the real standard.
What this is not: not a review manual, not a training course, not a guarantee. It is the rehearsal that tells you whether the AAIR exam is worth booking yet.
Groundwork: Definitions, Frameworks and Roles
90 questions · 170 minutes · pass mark 80%
Start here. This first test covers the vocabulary an AI risk professional is expected to use without hesitation: the four functions of the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, the seven characteristics of trustworthy AI, what ISO/IEC 42001 and ISO/IEC 23894 each set out to do, the four risk tiers of the EU AI Act, the difference between a provider and a deployer, risk appetite against tolerance against capacity, inherent against residual risk, the four treatment options, the Three Lines Model, control types, and the components of a well-formed risk scenario. The questions are short and direct, one concept each, so you can find your gaps quickly. The domain split matches the published ISACA weighting: 33 questions on AI Risk Governance and Framework Integration, 19 on AI Life Cycle Risk Management, 38 on AI Risk Program Management. You get 170 minutes, and the pass mark is 80 percent, deliberately higher than the real exam. Definitions are the cheapest marks on exam day, and you want them close to perfect before you move on to the scenario tests.
In Practice: Applying AI Risk Management
90 questions · 165 minutes · pass mark 80%
The second test moves from knowing a concept to using it. Short workplace situations ask you to fit AI risk into an existing enterprise risk framework and register, pick the framework that answers the question in front of you, classify a concrete use case against Annex III of the EU AI Act, apply the Article 50 transparency duties, decide what a policy exception should require, choose the control that actually addresses a named AI risk, tailor risk reporting to the board rather than to operations, and triage an AI incident. Most wrong answers here are not wrong facts, they are the neighbouring concept: a KRI where a KCI was asked for, mitigation where the scenario demanded escalation. That is exactly the confusion the real exam is built on. 90 questions, 165 minutes, 80 percent to pass, with results broken down by domain so you can see whether governance, life cycle or program management is the weaker half.
Trade-offs: Choosing the Defensible Option
90 questions · 160 minutes · pass mark 80%
Every question in this test has at least two defensible answers, and one constraint in the stem decides which is best. A data residency requirement, a regulatory deadline, a fixed budget, a board mandate, a contract that cannot be reopened. This is where AAIR candidates lose marks, because the exam asks for the BEST or the FIRST action rather than a correct one. You will weigh a current profile against a target profile, certification to ISO/IEC 42001 alongside an existing ISO/IEC 27001 system, centralised against federated governance, accepting a risk against mitigating it when it sits just inside appetite, quantitative against qualitative assessment, vendor exit against remediation, and fairness metrics that cannot all hold at the same time. The explanations set out why the runner-up is defensible and why it still loses. 90 questions, 160 minutes, 80 percent to pass.
Under the Hood: Articles, Thresholds and Taxonomies
90 questions · 155 minutes · pass mark 80%
The precision test. Article numbers, thresholds, deadlines and the order in which things have to happen. EU AI Act Article 14 human oversight including the two-person rule, Article 26 deployer duties with their log retention and notification periods, the Article 51 general-purpose AI threshold, the Article 99 penalty tiers, the certain application dates. On the technical side: the NIST adversarial machine learning taxonomy with evasion, poisoning, privacy and abuse attacks, the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025 numbering, MITRE ATLAS and how it relates to ATT&CK, cross-validation mechanics, drift detection statistics, differential privacy, model validation elements, and RTO, RPO and MTD arithmetic in a described outage. If you have been reading around the subject rather than into it, this test will show it. 90 questions, 155 minutes, 80 percent to pass.
Exam Day: Full 90-Question Simulation
90 questions · 150 minutes · pass mark 85%
The full dress rehearsal: 90 questions in 150 minutes, exactly the length and clock of the real AAIR exam, with the three domains mixed as they are on the day. The stems are the longest in this practice set, each carrying two or three constraints, and they run across the whole syllabus: a board asking for assurance it can act on, a multinational rollout under conflicting rules, a supervisory authority asking questions, an acquisition that arrives with an undocumented AI portfolio, a prompt injection incident in a customer-facing assistant, a poisoned training pipeline found late, a KRI that has been amber for three quarters, an agentic system that took an action nobody authorised. The pass mark is 85 percent rather than 80. Passing a practice exam at the same standard as the real one tells you very little; clearing it with room to spare is what tells you that you are ready to book.
What you will practice
- Test yourself against 450 questions built to the published ISACA AAIR domain weighting of 37, 21 and 42 percent
- Sit five full-length 90-question exams under the same 150-minute clock as the real AAIR exam
- Understand every answer: each option carries its own feedback and each question a sourced explanation
- See where you stand per domain, so you revise the area that is actually costing you marks
- Work up a deliberate difficulty curve from plain recall to full scenario simulation
- Recognise the framework behind a question: NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001 and 23894, and the EU AI Act
Exam domains covered
Who is this for
Risk, audit, compliance and security professionals who are preparing for the ISACA Advanced in AI Risk (AAIR) exam, and who already hold one of the qualifying credentials the certification requires, most often CRISC, CISA, CISM, CGEIT, CDPSE, CISSP or CIA. It also fits IT risk managers, technology risk officers, GRC analysts, internal auditors moving into AI oversight, privacy officers who have picked up AI governance, and consultants who advise clients on AI risk programmes.
AAIR is new. ISACA launched it on 15 April 2026 as the risk-focused member of a three-credential family, alongside AAIA (Advanced in AI Audit) and AAISM (Advanced in AI Security Management). It replaces nothing and retires nothing, and it is not a successor to CRISC: CRISC remains a separate certification and is the most common prerequisite for sitting AAIR. That matters when you choose study material, because AAIA material leans towards audit evidence and AAISM material towards security controls, while AAIR asks you to run an AI risk programme: identify scenarios, choose treatments, select and validate controls, report on metrics, manage supply chain exposure and handle incidents. Questions written for the other two credentials will not prepare you for this one.
Be clear about what this practice set is. It is a question bank with detailed explanations that tells you where you stand and closes gaps. It is not a substitute for the ISACA Review Manual, the official QAE database, or the working experience the credential assumes, and passing these tests is not a prediction that you will pass the exam.
Requirements
- No prior AI engineering knowledge is needed. AAIR is a risk credential, and the questions test risk judgement rather than model internals.
- You should be comfortable with everyday risk management language: appetite and tolerance, inherent and residual risk, controls, registers and key risk indicators. If you hold CRISC, CISA, CISM, CGEIT, CDPSE, CISSP, CIA or a similar credential, you already have this.
- These are practice exams, not a course. They work alongside ISACA's own review material and the free public sources cited in the explanations, not instead of them.
Free exam guide
Not sure what to expect? Read how the exam is built, what it covers and how to prepare.