No points. Meet the spec or fix it.

Why grading is weird here

Points let you skip one thing and make it up with another. Bundles don't. A student who ships seven strong harness pieces but writes no logs doesn't earn a B, because the log is where the thinking shows. Every piece is a yes or a no against a checklist you can read before you start. If it comes back, you fix it. That loop, decide, submit, get told no, revise, is the course.

Bundles

Absences with a doctor's note or confirmed varsity obligations are excused. A late Monday demo costs a token. The Nov 19 competition is a required event and counts as a class day. Core deliverables and mastery options, with every checklist, are on the deliverables page.

Tokens

• You start with two.
• One token buys one late submission, up to 72 hours, one resubmission of Needs Revision work outside the free window, or one absence that would otherwise count against your bundle.
• They don't carry over and unused tokens don't change your grade. I'll remind you what you have in Weeks 3 and 8.

The evaluator pass

Before I read any harness checkpoint or milestone, my own agent reads it first. It checks two things: does it run and do what the description says, and is it your design rather than a boilerplate someone else wrote. You get that report within a day and have 48 hours to revise for free before I look. The evaluator is one input, not the verdict. A submission that passes the evaluator but whose log has nothing to say about why is Needs Revision.

Mastery options

Team work, shared credit, due Fri Dec 11 with the Final Dossier. Two for a B, four for an A. Each has hard minimums; "we tried" is Needs Revision. Checklists on the deliverables page.

• External validation. Six or more conversations with organizations from your ten-more-customers list, and a two-page synthesis.
• Second deployment. The harness runs in a second organization for five working days.
• Sell it. A real transaction of at least $5 with a real stranger for work your harness does.
• Go-to-market experiment. Live landing page, a campaign you actually ran, honest metrics.
• Technical hardening. Forty or more real inputs, run before and after a change.
• Handoff manual. The process owner's colleague runs the harness from your docs while you watch and don't help.
• Operations plan. Three partners, a twelve-month roadmap, a budget with unit economics.

What each grade means you can do

The outcomes are tiered the way the bundles are. Each tier uses the verbs of one level of Bloom's taxonomy, and each maps to one of the minor's three program objectives: Research, Explore, Materialize.

Every student who passes (C) can:

• Explain what an agent, a skill, a hook, a rule, memory, and a sub-agent are, and describe what each is for. Explore
• Apply customer-interview and observation methods to document how a real process works today, in the words of the people who do it. Research
• Build a harness that runs a real task at three touch points, and demonstrate it on real inputs. Materialize
• Record decisions, evidence, and assumptions weekly in a form someone else could audit. Research

Students who earn a B can also:

• Analyze a process into its gather, synthesize, sense-make, and disseminate steps and classify which an agent can own and which a person must keep. Explore
• Compare the agent's output against a measured human baseline and judge where it is better, worse, and unsafe. Research
• Justify delegation decisions: what you handed to the agent, what you kept, and the rule that makes each safe. Materialize

Students who earn an A can also:

• Design and deploy a harness that a real organization runs without you, and evaluate it against the baseline you set in Week 5. Materialize
• Construct a business case that names who pays, what it is worth, and what it costs to run, and defend it to outside judges. Materialize
• Generate evidence that the inefficiency exists beyond your first customer, and propose what to build next. Explore

Questions people ask

Can I get a B with no mastery options if my core work is excellent? No. Excellent core work is a C. The bundle is the grade.

What if my team carries me, or I carry my team? Team deliverables are shared credit. Logs, harness checkpoints, the reflection, and the peer evaluation are individual. The peer evaluation is read.

What if the process owner backs out? Tell me the day it happens. You get a token-free week to find another; the interview floor doesn't move.

Is there rounding, extra credit, or a curve? No, no, and no.