Case dossier
Pick one documented capability loss from outside the syllabus and diagnose it using the course's own vocabulary.
Due: 26 March 2027 · Weight: 30%
Weeks 2 through 4 build a way of telling a records problem apart from a capability problem. This assessment asks you to run that method on a case you find yourself, outside the reading list, and write it up as a dossier: what was claimed to be lost, what evidence exists for the record track and the capability track separately, and where — if anywhere — a rupture point sits between them.
The hardest part of this assessment is usually not the analysis. It’s finding a case with enough public documentation to support the analysis at all, and being honest in the dossier about exactly how much that documentation actually settles.
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.
- The case is real, documented outside this course, and not one already used as a case in the syllabus.
- Every factual claim carries a citation to a source a marker can find and check.
- The dossier states explicitly whether the case is a records problem, a capability problem, or a contested claim in week 9's sense — and argues for that classification rather than asserting it.
- No fabricated or unverifiable sources. An invented citation is graded as the most serious failure the dossier can have, worse than a weak argument built on real sources.
How it is marked
Judged on whether the diagnosis actually uses the record-track / capability-track distinction to say something the source material didn't already say, and on whether every factual claim in the dossier is traceable to a real, checkable source.