Closing Viva

One question, eight minutes, your own stream. The question was published in week one and has not changed: which part of your performance became true, and how do you know. There is no second question and no supplementary reading. The whole difficulty is in the second clause.

The format#

Your convenor and two peers from your stream sit the panel. You get two minutes uninterrupted, then six of examination, and the examination is entirely about evidence. “I’m much more confident now” is not an answer. “In week 3 I wrote that I had never deployed anything other people depended on; here is the thing, and here are the two people who depend on it” is an answer, and takes about the same amount of breath.

Cross-stream observers are admitted and encouraged. Watching a commercial student defend a claim to Sunil Raman, if you have spent twelve weeks in the technical room, is the fastest available correction to the belief that your field’s conventions are the natural ones.

What you are actually being asked#

Three things, in this order:

• Name one claim from your week 1 Baseline Inventory that was scaffolding then and is load-bearing now, with the receipt.
• Name one that is still scaffolding. Say so plainly. Nobody has ever lost marks in this room for that sentence, and several people have lost them for avoiding it.
• Say what you are going to do about the second one, on a timeline with a date in it.

That is the seamwork. The join between performed and genuine is not shameful and it is not permanent; it is simply where the work goes next, and knowing where it is beats pretending the surface is continuous.

Dates#

The capstone, Applications in the Wild, is due Wednesday 2027-05-26 — nine days after this tutorial. It is graded on your process artefacts only: never on whether you received an offer, never on the prestige of the organisation. The full brief and the criteria are at Assessment 4.

Bring the viva into it. The best audits in this course have historically been written in the three days after being examined, while the question someone asked that you could not answer is still annoying you.

Leaving with#

Dossier §13: the performance-versus-genuine audit, and with it the Dossier closed — thirteen sections, twelve reflection entries, and a folder of receipts for a person you have partly become. Keep it after submission. It is the only document you will own that records what you could not do in February, and in about two years that will be the useful part.