Assignment 1: First Forensics
A single passage of text, two independent checks, and a verdict you can defend to someone assigned to disagree with you
Due: 8 March 2027 · Weight: 10%
The brief#
Take one passage of text you don’t already know the origin of, and work out — with evidence, not instinct — whether a person or a model most likely wrote it.
This is the lowest-stakes piece of graded work in the course and it is meant to be: a single passage, not a mixed case; a written verdict, not a live presentation; two checks, not a full toolkit. The room this assignment leaves is in the choice of passage and the choice of checks — a strong response finds a genuinely hard case rather than an easy one, and picks two checks that could actually disagree with each other rather than two that always agree.
What you submit#
A short written workup (300–500 words is plenty): the passage or a link to it, the two checks you ran, what each one told you, and your verdict with a stated confidence level. Show your working — a bare verdict with no visible reasoning is not a workup, it’s a guess with a byline.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- submitted by the deadline as a short written workup
- applies at least two independent textual checks to the same passage
- states a confidence level that matches the evidence actually presented
How it is marked
Marked as one piece of work rather than a checklist — whether at least two genuinely independent checks were applied rather than two versions of the same check, whether the write-up would let a stranger retrace the reasoning, and whether the stated confidence matches the evidence actually gathered rather than the strength of the initial hunch.