Assess students' ability to analyze consistency versus fault-tolerance trade-offs in distributed databases by applying the CAP theorem, evaluating quorum-based protocols, comparing Paxos and Raft consensus algorithms, and reasoning about eventual consistency. Include scenario-based items that require explaining guarantees (safety, liveness), failure modes under partitions, quorum sizing and its impact on availability and latency, leader election and recovery behaviors, and recommending design choices for specific workloads and fault models with justification.