Assess students' ability to analyze safety and liveness trade-offs in Paxos and Raft under network partitions and asynchrony. Tasks: compare formal safety guarantees and liveness conditions for each protocol; identify how assumptions (synchrony model, failure types, quorums, leader election) affect guarantees; evaluate protocol behavior in partitioned and highly asynchronous scenarios, including CAP and partial synchrony implications; critique common variants and propose configuration or algorithmic changes that improve liveness without compromising safety, with justified trade-off analysis, diagrams, and brief proofs or counterexamples where appropriate.