Assess students' understanding of the definitions, guarantees, operational differences, and trade-offs among strong (e.g., linearizable/sequential), eventual, and causal consistency in distributed systems; evaluate ability to state each model's read/write behaviors and ordering guarantees, compare implications for latency, availability, and partition tolerance, and choose the appropriate model for simple real-world scenarios (replicated key-value stores, social feeds) with brief explanations. Scope: introductory concepts only—no formal proofs or advanced mathematics.