Final Exam

A scored assessment covering the whole course — Parts 1–6, the loop library, the practice projects, and the T4 advanced tier. Pass by demonstrating you can name and apply the shapes, not recite the pages. Open-book: every question links back to the page that teaches it, because looking things up is the mechanical layer working exactly as intended.

How this is scored

A question is graded correct only if the answer names the mechanism, not just the vocabulary — "a checker" isn't a full answer to "why didn't the loop notice its own mistake"; "a separate checker, because the maker never grades its own work" is.

Section 1 — The Shift (15 pts)

1. (5 pts) Name the two things that stay with the human even after a task is fully looped, per Step 1.
2. (5 pts) A bug persists no matter how the prompt is reworded. Using the four layers, explain which layer is actually failing and why re-prompting can't fix it.
3. (5 pts) State the six parts of a loop, in order, from Anatomy of a Loop.

Section 2 — The Heartbeat (20 pts)

4. (5 pts) Give one task that fits a schedule heartbeat and one that fits conditional/ run-until-done, and justify the choice for each — per the A-of-A–F "the way it ends picks the heartbeat" rule.
5. (5 pts) Name the three valid stops for a conditional loop.
6. (5 pts) What happens to an event that arrives after an event-driven loop's per-hour cap is already hit — and what mechanism catches it later?
7. (5 pts) Name two things a Routine's creation form asks for that a local /loop does not need to answer at all.

Section 3 — The Body (20 pts)

8. (5 pts) Why does a fix loop run inside a worktree instead of the main checkout?
9. (5 pts) What problem does a SKILL.md solve that a longer inline prompt does not?
10. (5 pts) State the three connector rules for MCP tools from Step 10.
11. (5 pts) Explain, in one sentence, why the maker is never allowed to also be the checker.

Section 4 — The Spine (10 pts)

12. (5 pts) What's the difference in role between the rules file and the progress file?
13. (5 pts) A loop crashes mid-beat. Explain what's lost and what survives, assuming the spine discipline from Step 12 was followed correctly.

Section 5 — A Complete Loop & Human Control (15 pts)

14. (5 pts) Name the seven-item minimum-safe checklist a loop clears before its first run.
15. (5 pts) What does "green ≠ done" mean, concretely, in terms of what a checkmark can and can't prove?
16. (5 pts) Name the three nested loops from Part 6 and what each one's "arrow" points toward.

Section 6 — The Prebuilt Library & Operating Discipline (10 pts)

17. (4 pts) Name the four clauses of the multi-loop coordination contract.
18. (3 pts) What's the difference between a doom loop and a ping-pong failure?
19. (3 pts) Name the three layers of a tested kill switch.

Section 7 — T4 Advanced Tier (10 pts)

20. (5 pts) Explain the difference between self-learning and self-improving, and why only one of them is safe by default — per hill-climbing.md.
21. (5 pts) Name the three governance records from governance.md and the question each one answers.

Scoring your own attempt

Answer every question in writing before checking any page. Grade honestly against the point values above — this exam is self-administered but not self-gradeable in the sense that matters: pair it with the capstone-rubric for your Project 8 build, since a written score alone doesn't prove you can build what you can describe.

When it goes wrong

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Sources: every question is drawn directly from this course's own pages, which draw on Panaversity's Loop Engineering: A Crash Course (S1) as the backbone, plus S2–S9 per the specific step cited above. Full attribution: resources/sources.md.