Evaluate students' ability to analyze and compare the performance and fault‑tolerance trade-offs of Paxos, Raft, and PBFT under network partitions and varying failure models (crash‑stop, crash‑recovery, Byzantine, intermittent partitions). Assess understanding of algorithmic assumptions (safety vs. liveness), leader election and quorum behavior, message/time complexity, impacts on latency, throughput and availability, experimental/simulation design and metrics, and practical mitigation or tuning strategies.