Assess students' ability to analyze and compare scalability, consistency, and fault-tolerance trade-offs among Paxos, Raft, and PBFT within a partial synchrony model and under Byzantine failures. Require examination of each protocol's assumptions (synchrony model, failure model, leader vs. leaderless design), safety and liveness guarantees, quorum and message complexity, and empirical performance implications (latency, throughput) when faced with crashes, partitions, and Byzantine behavior. Students should produce qualitative and quantitative comparisons (e.g., Big-O, message rounds), explain how partial synchrony affects liveness proofs, and justify protocol selection for specific system requirements and threat models.