Assess students' ability to analyze and compare distributed consensus algorithms (Paxos, Raft, PBFT/Byzantine protocols), emphasizing safety versus liveness trade-offs, performance under partial synchrony and node failures, message/time complexity, fault models, and real-world deployment considerations such as leader election, recovery, scalability, and behavior under network partitions; items may ask for scenario-based reasoning, protocol guarantees, performance prediction, and algorithm selection for given production constraints.