Week 08 · Due 23 April 2027 · Assessment

Performance Materials

Materials fitted to one named target — CV, cover letter or pitch, one field-appropriate artefact — plus the Varnish Note recording every presentational decision and what it reveals or conceals.

Worth 25% of the course

This is the pack you would actually send. Not a generic pack with the company name swapped in — a pack fitted to one named target, with a written record of every decision you made about how it looks.

The facts

  • Submit the fitted materials plus the Varnish Note, as one bundle, through the course submission point.
  • Due Friday 23 April 2027, 5:00 pm (end of week 8).
  • Worth 25% of the course.
  • Marked against the four weighted criteria at the foot of this page.

What goes in

Name the target first — one role, one organisation, from your A1 shortlist. Then four things fitted to it.

  1. A CV or résumé, rewritten for this target rather than for everyone.
  2. A cover letter, pitch or criteria response, in whatever form that target actually reads.
  3. One field-appropriate artefact. Technical Practice: a repository front page and README. Creative and Communications: a portfolio case study in sequence. Commercial and Public: a one-page capability brief.
  4. The Varnish Note. Every presentational decision you made, what it reveals, and what it conceals. Both halves. “I moved the group project to the top because it is the only thing with a user count, which also moves my solo work down the page” is an entry. “Improved layout” is not.

Where it comes from

Week 5 gives you the three anecdotes the letter is built from. Week 6 is the varnish week — the lecture and its deck set out the four thin-varnish moves and the four thick-varnish tells, and the gallery walk puts your draft on a wall with written critique beside it. Use the teaching break to build, not to polish. Week 8 red-teams the pack inside your stream and times how long it takes a peer to find your weakest claim; the diff note you leave with is what you revise against.

What separates a strong submission

Fitness is 30 marks and it is decided in the first fifteen seconds of reading. A marker who cannot tell from the top third which role this is for has already priced that in.

Evidence is 25, and it is the same test as A1: can a stranger verify it without you in the room. Receipt debt you carried out of week 4 is expected to be paid down by now, not restated.

Performance awareness is another 25, and it is the Varnish Note doing the work. The note is graded on honesty and specificity, not on the materials being unvarnished. Varnish is not a lie; it is a claim about where to look. An unflattering true entry scores; a flattering vague one does not.

Craft is 20. Typos, broken links, a README that does not say what the thing does, a case study with no problem statement — these are cheap marks to lose.

The line this sits on

Fitting materials to a target means selecting and framing what is true. It never means inventing, inflating a role you did not hold, or claiming a team’s output as yours. Attribution is checked here and again at the capstone, and overclaiming is an academic integrity matter under the policies page.

Next in the ladder: the capstone, A4 — Applications in the Wild, where this pack goes out.

The spec

What a marker checks

The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part — some lines can be checked mechanically, the rest call for judgement.

  • the materials name their target and are demonstrably fitted to it
  • the Varnish Note records what each presentational decision conceals as well as what it reveals
  • no claim in the pack exceeds the evidence you can produce for it

How it is marked

4 weighted criteria

30%Fitness to the named target rather than to a generic reader
25%Evidence behind every claim; receipt debt paid down
25%Performance awareness — the Varnish Note's honesty and specificity
20%Craft and legibility of the materials themselves

Sums to 100%.