Course standards — the bar every module is held to

The bar every module is held to. Checkable, not aspirational.

1. Chapter anatomy (all eight required)

1. Learning outcome — one sentence, measurable verb, states what the student can do.
2. Primary reading — exact: lecture number, textbook chapter and section. “Read the docs” is not a reading.
3. Teaching — the mechanism and why, with a derivation or a reason, not a list of facts.
4. Common misconceptions — two, each with the wrong model and the correction. This is what distinguishes teaching from summarising.
5. Worked example — reasoning shown, not just the answer.
6. Self-check — four items, answers with reasoning.
7. Problem set — five graduated problems (recall → apply → analyse → synthesise), each with marks, totalling 20.
8. Solutions — worked, with the mark allocation visible.

2. Assessment instruments

• Exams are 100 marks, 2–3 hours. 40 marks in 90 minutes is a quiz, not a tertiary paper.
• Section marks must sum to the paper total. Checked mechanically.
• Every question has a published mark scheme: sub-item marks, partial-credit rules, and a model answer. A paper without a scheme is not assessable twice.
• Time budget published and consistent with marks at ~1.2 min/mark.
• Grade descriptors published: what a 50, a 60 and a 70 look like in that module’s answers — in behaviour, not adjectives.

3. Constructive alignment

Every exam question maps to a stated module outcome. If a question tests something no outcome claims, either the outcome or the question is wrong.

4. The conformance check

This page says what must be present. Chapter quality checklist says whether the chapter actually teaches. Wording standard says whether the sentences carry the subject or get in its way. All three passes are recorded per chapter in the repo at review/first-year.md:

• Structure — the eight sections above, a numeric reading citation, a problem set totalling 20, and a scheme entry for every exam question.
• Quality — the twenty-eight items in the checklist. A must failure means the chapter is a draft and does not ship.
• Wording — the three scriptable rules in the wording standard: banned words, sentence length, paragraph length. python3 scripts/check-wording.py.