Asking Good Questions
Thought Cove answers only from the documents you give it. Understanding how it retrieves and cites makes your questions far more effective.
Select the right documents
Before asking, choose which documents to query. Narrowing to the relevant catalog or policy manual gives tighter, better-cited answers than searching everything at once.
Screenshot — The document selector with a few documents checked before a query.
How an answer is built
When you ask a question, Thought Cove embeds it, finds the most relevant passages across your selected documents, and synthesizes an answer grounded only in those passages. Every answer carries inline citations — [1], [2] — tied to the exact source text and page number.
It won’t make things up
If the answer isn’t in your selected documents, Thought Cove says so rather than guessing. That “not in the corpus” honesty is the point — you can trust a cited answer and act on a clear “not found.”
Phrasing tips
- Ask one thing at a time — split compound questions.
- Use the institution’s own terms (course codes, section numbers, policy names); these match precisely.
- Prefer specific over broad: “What GPA triggers academic probation?” beats “Tell me about grades.”
- If an answer cites the wrong section, add a constraint — name the document, program, or year.
Follow the citations
Use the citations to jump to the source passage. Because every claim is anchored to a page, you can verify an answer in seconds — exactly what you want when it feeds an accreditation response or a student-facing decision.
Querying doesn’t spend ingestion pages. See Understanding Pages & Billing.