Assess advanced high‑school students' ability to evaluate design trade‑offs among consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (CAP theorem) when building fault‑tolerant distributed systems. Provide scenarios with network partitions, latency constraints, and failure modes; require selection of consistency models, replication/consensus approaches, and operational choices (quorum sizes, leader vs leaderless, reconciliation). Students must justify decisions in terms of correctness, performance, recovery, and user experience, stating assumptions and expected failure behaviors.