The Critique Portfolio
Six notes across six domains, plus an honest account of where the method held and where it didn't.
Due: 17 May 2027 · Weight: 50%
The brief#
Prove, with evidence rather than assertion, whether one method for giving feedback actually survives six unrelated domains.
By week 11 you’ll have written notes on visual work, code, prose, a blind proposal, a published-style review, and a brief. The Final Project collects the strongest of each into a portfolio, and asks you to argue — using the notes themselves as evidence — whether “specific, falsifiable, about the work” is a real method or a description that happened to fit this semester’s assignments.
The scope that fits twelve weeks is six short notes and a two-page argument, not a rewrite of any of them into something longer. The work was already done, week by week; this is the case for what it adds up to.
What you submit#
One document: the six notes, each with the piece of work it was about named or linked, and a two-page argument that uses the notes as evidence for or against the semester’s claim — including, explicitly, your weakest note and what it shows.
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, in the format named below
- it includes at least one note per critique domain --- visual art, code, prose, peer review, criticism-as-genre, and the brief itself
- it names, specifically, the note in the portfolio you're least sure of, and why
- it stands on its own, without you there to explain it
How it is marked
Marked as a whole against the semester's own claim, that a note built from three properties --- specific, falsifiable, about the work --- holds up across unrelated domains. A portfolio that shows the method working smoothly every time is weaker evidence for that claim than one that names the domain it strained in and says why. The strongest portfolios read as an argument, not a collection.