Assessment 3: the run

Thirty hours on the course you stalled on and still need, driven by the mechanism you built, ending in an exam set on the quarter you cut

Due: 24 May 2027 · Weight: 50%

Point the thing you built at the wall you have already failed to get over.

Everything before this was rehearsal, on material you had chosen and were willing to spend time on. This is the case the course exists for: something you started, stopped, restarted and stopped again, and still believe you need.

Not something you dislike. If the mechanism gets you through thirty hours of material you find dull, the claim you have supported is that it makes boredom tolerable — which is small, and not what this course argues. The claim worth testing is that a short enough loop gets you past a wall that willpower did not.

What you do#

Pick the target in week 10. Route A is to nominate your own, and it is the one that tests what the course claims: a stall you can evidence, plus a reason the material matters that does not depend on this course. Route B is the Draft, which assigns you a subject you are unlikely to enjoy, for people who genuinely cannot name a stall. Both are marked out of the same total; the feedback on B will say which of the two questions it answered. Locked once chosen.

Cut a quarter. About thirty hours. A coherent quarter, not merely the first one: the smallest slice containing something the subject is actually for, even if that means skipping preliminaries the textbook puts first. If you have always stalled in the same place, that place goes in the cut — routing around it would make the whole exercise pointless.

Run it for weeks 10 to 12, with both mechanisms wired together as in week 11 — attempts find the fights, sittings do the work, and every sitting attacks exactly one thing named before you start.

Sit the exam in week 12.

The exam#

Set by us on the quarter you nominated, from your own material, and written to test whether you can use the ideas rather than whether you have seen them.

It is not comparable between students and it is not intended to be — yours is harder or easier than your neighbour’s depending on what you picked. That is why it is 40% rather than everything, and why the criterion is the exam rather than the exam score: what it establishes is that learning happened at all, against the baseline you wrote in week 10. Every other artefact you hand in is something you wrote about yourself, and this is the only one that isn’t. The reasoning behind marking it this way is on the policies page, including what we considered and rejected.

What you hand in#

• The logs. The verdict stream, the boss tree, the attempt lines, with dates. Gaps stay in. A fortnight with a hole in it, shown, is worth more than a tidy record, and the sittings you didn’t log are never a random sample.
• The evidence of the stall — one paragraph, specific enough that we could have predicted your behaviour from it, and naming what the material is for. Dated and countable: opened chapter three four times since March, never reached chapter four. Not a mood.
• The baseline you wrote in week 10, unedited, including where you stopped last time.
• The account — two pages. Did the mechanism cause the result?

On the account#

The confounded answers are the good ones. Some of you will do well and be unable to attribute it: the wall turned out to be lower than you remembered, or the mechanism ran four days and then you simply worked. Say so, and show which stretch was which. A frank account of a confounded result marks better than a confident story, and confident stories are easy to spot because they never mention the weeks that didn’t fit.

Stalling again is not a failed submission. If the mechanism ran faithfully and you stopped in the same place you always stop, that is a result, and shown properly it earns this criterion in full. It is also the most useful thing anyone hands in, because it is the case the whole design still has to answer for.

Argue from the logs, not from memory. By week 12 your memory of week 10 has been replaced by a story about week 10, and the logs are the only part of this that did not get rewritten.