Assess students’ ability to analyze time and space trade-offs among insertion sort, merge sort, and quicksort across input types (random, sorted, reverse-sorted, nearly-sorted, and arrays with many duplicates). Test understanding of best/average/worst-case time complexities, auxiliary space use, stability, in-place vs. non-in-place behavior, recursion/stack overhead, and practical pivot/threshold choices; include comparative justification questions and short traces or runtime counting on small inputs.