Week 12 Session: Defending the Trail

Can every step of your investigation withstand informed challenge? The final session is a live defence of a complete, unassisted investigation of a system you have never seen before.

17 May 2027

Before the session#

There is no instructor framing of what matters in the assigned system beyond a failure report. Everything else — which evidence class to reach for, what counts as sufficient — is your call, and has been building toward this all semester.

The synthesis exercise#

Before the Final itself, this session runs a smaller rehearsal: a system neither you nor anyone else in the room has seen, scoped small enough and timed short enough that completing a full repair isn’t realistic. What you produce instead is a condensed trail — starting observations, the hypotheses you held, why you chose the evidence you gathered, the moment your uncertainty actually narrowed, what you’d intervene with, how you’d verify it, and what would still be uncertain if you stopped here. There is no recipe for this; the exercise exists to rehearse producing a defensible chain of reasoning under a real time limit, not to produce a fix.

What the defence actually tests#

The live defence — for this exercise and for the Final — is not a presentation to rehearse until it sounds polished. A questioner will ask things like why you trusted a particular piece of evidence, what result would have changed your conclusion, which alternative you ruled out and how, and what your verification does and doesn’t prove. There is no credit for a narrative that sounds complete; there is credit for a trail that survives being pushed on, including the parts you’d have to admit are still unverified.

In the session#

You present your observation-to-verification trail — first for the synthesis exercise, then, in the Final itself, for a previously unseen system assigned individually — to a questioner who probes for unstated assumptions, hypotheses you never actually tested, and verification claims that don’t hold up. The defence is oral and live; the questions are not supplied in advance.

Afterwards#

This is the final teaching session of the semester. What leaves the room is whatever your investigation trail could actually withstand under challenge — not a polished report of what you’d like it to have been.