Every task page publishes its criteria table on the day the task is launched, which means you can find out how the work will be read before you have written a line of it. Almost nobody uses that. The table gets read once at launch, and then work is handed in missing two rows that twenty minutes would have fixed.
This page is those twenty minutes. We run it together the first time, on a draft that belongs to nobody in the room, so that the move is already familiar the day it is your own work under the microscope.
Three passes, in order
- Put them side by side. The task page open on one half of the screen, your work on the other. Not from memory — from the actual table.
- Rule on every row. For each one write yes, not yet, or halfway, and beside it the evidence a reader would see: the file, the line number, the paragraph, the sentence. A “yes” with nothing beside it is a hope, not a judgement.
- Name the worst row and set a time. Not the easiest to fix — the worst. Then one sentence: what you will change, and in which period you will change it.
The ruling is the hard part, not the fixing. Writing “not yet” beside a row means admitting the thing you were quietly hoping nobody would open, and everybody’s first instinct is to award themselves the row and move on.
One row, ruled honestly
From The Device Recommendation: “Requirements drive the choice — every number traces back to something they do.”
Halfway. The memory traces back — she said twelve tabs and a video call, and I wrote that down. The processor does not: I put the faster one in because the model I liked came with it, and nothing she told me needs it. Worst row.
Change: go back through my interview notes for anything that would actually wait on a slower chip, and if there is nothing, drop to the cheaper one and put the money into the screen. Next period, first thing.
That ruling took four minutes and is worth more than “looks good” written nine times.
Why it never happens on the due date
Look at where this page is linked from in the schedule: always a period or two before something is handed in, never on the day. A judgement you have no time to act on is not assessment, it is just worry — so the arc always leaves a working period between the ruling and the deadline, and that period is where the mark actually moves.
Where this sits in the mark
Nowhere, and deliberately. Your judgement of your own work is not part of your mark, and neither is a classmate’s — How Marks Work says why. Nothing you write here can cost you anything, which is precisely what makes it worth writing honestly.
What it changes is the work. By the end of the course most of you run these three passes without being asked, on a program nobody is going to collect, because you would rather find the broken row than be told about it. That habit is the actual point of the page.
Read your ruling out loud
To the person beside you, or to the wall. Generosity is much easier to hear than to see, and you will usually catch the row you were being kind about before anyone else has to mention it.