Assess students' ability to analyze and compare performance, consistency, and fault-tolerance trade-offs among Paxos, Raft, and Byzantine-consensus variants during network partitions and node failures. Tasks include explaining safety vs. liveness guarantees, quorum intersection and leader election impacts, message- and latency-driven performance degradation, effects of crash versus Byzantine faults, recovery and reconfiguration strategies, and interpreting experimental or theoretical metrics (throughput, latency, availability). Expect reasoned recommendations for protocol selection and mitigation strategies under specified failure models and partition scenarios.