Homework

This course has two homework assignments, each worth 4% of your course grade (8% total). Both are mock system design interviews conducted with a classmate, held in the second half of the semester. See the Schedule for release and due dates.

Why mock interviews

One of this course’s learning outcomes is that you can approach and solve system design problems confidently, the way you would be asked to in a real technical interview, and communicate your design decisions, including the alternatives you considered and why you rejected them. That is a skill you build by practicing it under realistic conditions: explaining your reasoning out loud, to another person, in real time, while they ask follow-up questions and push back on your choices. Reading about a design and producing your own design under those conditions are different skills, and interviews (and this course) test the second one, not the first.

Format

For each of the two assignments, you play both roles, each with a different classmate: as interviewer with one randomly assigned partner, and as interviewee with another. When you are the interviewer, you are given a case study and its sample solution ahead of time, and you use it to interview your partner. When you are the interviewee, you do not see the case study in advance; your interviewer has it and interviews you on it. Each interview is conducted over a video call and recorded, and you submit the recording along with a self-evaluation and a peer evaluation of the partner you interviewed.

Full instructions on scheduling, recording, submission, and the evaluation rubric come with each assignment’s description when it is released.

Grading

Grading uses a rubric focused on the quality of the interview you conducted (as both interviewer and interviewee) and the quality of your self- and peer evaluations, not on whether you arrived at one particular “correct” design. As with any open-ended design problem, I am primarily looking for a defensible design, clearly communicated, not a specific expected answer.

Academic integrity

The interview portion must be your own live, unaided performance: you may not read from a pre-written script or have an AI assistant feeding you answers during the interview. You may use AI assistants beforehand to help you study a topic or rehearse, but not during the interview itself.

Your assigned case study and its sample solution are confidential: do not share them with your interviewee, or with anyone else, before or after the interview (see the Academic Integrity policy in the Syllabus).