The exam#

Set on the quarter you cut in week 10, from the material you nominated.

Written to test whether you can use the ideas, not whether you saw them.

It is not comparable between students, and it is not meant to be#

So the criterion is the exam, not the exam score#

Yours is harder or easier than the person next to you depending on what you picked.

You cannot improve your mark by picking an easy subject, and you cannot lose marks by picking a brutal one.

You can lose marks by picking something you have not actually stalled on, because the evidence of the stall is marked too.

What it establishes, and nothing else can#

Whether learning actually happened.

Every other artefact in this course is something you wrote about yourself.

Some of you will do well and be unable to attribute it#

The wall turned out to be lower than you remembered. You had a light fortnight elsewhere. The mechanism ran for four days and then you just worked.

Say so.

A frank account of a confounded result is worth more than a confident story, and confident stories are easy to spot: they never mention the weeks that didn’t fit.

The interesting failure is the opposite one#

The mechanism ran faithfully for three weeks and you stalled in the same place you always stall.

That is a result. Shown properly it earns this criterion in full, and it is more useful to the person reading it than another success.

Argue from the logs#

The verdict stream. The attempt lines. The boss tree with its dates.

Show us the stretch where the mechanism was running and the stretch where it wasn’t, and what the difference looks like.

By now your memory of week 10 has been replaced by a story about week 10. The logs are the only part of this that did not get rewritten.

Removing something is a judgement#

Adding to a system is easy and feels like progress.

To remove a part you have to decide that something which cost you effort is not earning it.

Every mechanism worth keeping has a shorter version, and the person who can name their shorter version understands their own design.

Where we started, twelve weeks ago#