The Undergraduate Year 4 (Senior) Distributed Systems rubric is designed to assess students’ mastery of key concepts; principles; and practical skills in distributed computing. This rubric evaluates students’ ability to design; implement; and analyze distributed systems; ensuring they meet performance; scalability; and reliability requirements. Students will demonstrate their understanding of fundamental topics such as consensus algorithms; fault tolerance; replication; and distributed coordination. The rubric also measures their proficiency in applying these concepts to real-world scenarios; including cloud computing; microservices; and peer-to-peer networks. Educational benefits of this rubric include fostering critical thinking and problem-solving skills as students tackle complex distributed systems challenges. By evaluating their work against clear criteria; students gain insight into their strengths and areas for improvement; promoting self-directed learning. The rubric encourages hands-on experience with modern tools and frameworks; preparing students for industry demands. It also emphasizes collaboration; as distributed systems often require teamwork to design and deploy scalable solutions. Students will be assessed on their ability to articulate technical decisions; justify design choices; and analyze trade-offs in distributed architectures. This cultivates strong communication skills; essential for professional environments. The rubric ensures students can evaluate system performance; identify bottlenecks; and propose optimizations; reinforcing analytical and engineering best practices. By meeting these learning objectives; students will be well-equipped to contribute to distributed systems projects in academic or industry settings; bridging the gap between theory and practice. The rubric ultimately supports the development of competent; confident graduates ready to tackle the challenges of modern computing systems.
