{"actors":["Graduate students preparing for the literary-theory qualifying examination","Faculty examiners representing different periods, traditions, and theoretical schools","The graduate program director and curriculum committee","Faculty advisers supporting preparation and interpreting requirements","Department administrators responsible for scheduling and progression rules"],"affected_objective":"Deploy a successor literary-theory qualifying examination that preserves assessable close reading and theory application while keeping required preparation, advising, examiner calibration, and student progression operable.","arm":"ORDINARY_DIVERSE_P2","authority_safety":{"authorized_first_step":"The graduate program director may convene a read-only mapping session using the current examination guide, archived prompts, anonymized outcome records, documented student questions, and proposed additions; participants may classify and estimate requirements but may not alter any student’s examination conditions.","decision_authority":"The graduate curriculum committee approves the core contract, workload budget, and release tiers; the graduate program director controls scheduling and transition rules; faculty examiners retain authority over disciplinary accuracy within the approved assessment contract.","excluded_actions":["Changing requirements for students already admitted under the current examination contract without an opt-in transition","Using school affiliation, canon preference, or faculty seniority as a substitute for the admission criteria","Removing accessibility accommodations or due-process protections","Treating every faculty specialty as mandatory core coverage","Retiring the current examination before a calibrated successor and fallback procedure exist"],"halt_rollback":"Halt the successor launch if a mock administration cannot be completed, scored consistently, advised within available capacity, or scheduled without disrupting current progression. Retain the existing examination for the next cohort and return non-core additions to the staged module register."},"baseline":"Continue revising the qualifying examination through faculty negotiation in which omitted theorists, schools, traditions, genres, methodological debates, and assessment formats are added to one required successor package without reconstructing the pilot’s focusing constraints, separating core competencies from coverage ambitions, or setting a cumulative preparation-and-calibration budget.","candidate_id":"second_system_complexity_restraint__literature_literary_theory__ORDINARY_DIVERSE_P2","causal_chain":["A compact pilot examination succeeds by asking students to demonstrate close reading, reconstruct a theoretical argument, and apply selected concepts across a deliberately bounded reading portfolio.","Authorization for a program-wide successor removes the pilot’s limits on reading volume, theory families, examiner participation, and assessment format.","The pilot’s exclusions remain visible as gaps, so postponed requests for additional schools, traditions, debates, media, and methodological competencies are recast as minimum disciplinary literacy.","Because coverage requests and core assessment obligations enter the same revision process, each proposed addition appears defensible while their combined prerequisite, reading, advising, and scoring burdens remain unrepresented.","The successor consequently risks testing navigation of an enlarged requirement set rather than the preserved capacities to read closely, compare arguments, and justify theoretical application.","A predecessor-constraint record identifies which pilot limits impaired representation and which created coherent preparation, comparable prompts, and calibratable judgments.","A successor competency contract fixes the capacities and continuity protections required at launch while separating them from optional field coverage and experimental examination modes.","A coverage-admission gate and workload budget require each proposed addition to state its distinct competency value, overlap, prerequisites, preparation hours, advising demand, scoring implications, and launch-tier fit.","A staged module rotation gives deferred traditions and methods legitimate review paths without making all of them simultaneous requirements.","A mock-examination gate tests the whole successor for completion, scorer calibration, advising feasibility, and transition reversibility before it replaces the current examination."],"cell_id":"second_system_complexity_restraint__literature_literary_theory","consequence":"The successor examination may become too expansive to prepare for coherently or administer consistently, encouraging checklist coverage, ambiguous advising, divergent examiner expectations, delayed progression, and repeated postponement of the new assessment contract.","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"This opportunity concerns the successor design of a graduate literary-theory competency assessment, with student preparation, examiner calibration, and academic progression as the affected system; its intervention governs required competencies and rotating coverage modules rather than a scholarly edition or publication apparatus.","experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp13_second_slot_policy60_20260806","intervention":"Establish a Qualifying-Exam Successor Compact. Reconstruct the pilot’s constraints and record both the exclusions they caused and the functions they served in preparation, advising, prompt construction, and scorer agreement. Partition proposed work into preserved competencies, due-process and accessibility obligations, defects in the current assessment, validated competency improvements, expanded field coverage, experimental formats, and parked ambitions. Define the launch contract around close reading, accurate reconstruction of theoretical arguments, comparison of concepts, and justified application to literary works. Require a coverage dossier for every proposed theorist cluster, tradition, method, or examination mode, naming its nonduplicative competency, prerequisites, reading hours, advising load, prompt implications, scoring rule, and coupling to other requirements. Enforce budgets for required reading hours, concept families, prerequisite chains, examination modes, adviser preparation, and calibration sessions. Place unadmitted coverage into rotating post-launch modules with named review triggers. Before adoption, run a paper preparation audit and an anonymized mock examination, while preserving the existing examination as the transition fallback.","mechanism_mapping":[{"counterfactual_removal":"Without the record, every bounded feature of the pilot can be treated as intellectual inadequacy, even when it enabled coherent preparation, comparable questions, or consistent examiner judgment.","mechanism_slug":"constraint_release_inventory","role":"Documents each pilot constraint, its representational cost, its focusing function, and any replacement discipline needed before release."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without a fixed competency contract, requests for additional coverage can continually redefine what the examination is supposed to establish.","mechanism_slug":"successor_charter","role":"Defines the smallest successor assessment that preserves demonstrated literary-theoretical competencies and current student protections."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without dossier-based admission, locally valuable theorists, traditions, and formats can accumulate without exposing overlap, prerequisites, or assessment burdens.","mechanism_slug":"feature_admission_rubric","role":"Tests each coverage or format addition against distinct competency value, preparation cost, coupling, assessability, advising demand, and tier fit."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without a cumulative budget, individually acceptable additions can jointly make preparation, advising, scheduling, or calibration infeasible.","mechanism_slug":"complexity_budget_review","role":"Caps the combined reading, conceptual, procedural, and faculty-support burden of the launch examination."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without a legitimate later path, faculty may relabel favored coverage as indispensable because deferral appears equivalent to permanent exclusion.","mechanism_slug":"postlaunch_ambition_thaw_review","role":"Routes deferred schools, traditions, and experimental formats into rotating modules reconsidered after specified evidence or capacity triggers."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without an end-to-end gate, the committee can approve an attractive curriculum design without learning whether students can prepare for it or examiners can administer it consistently.","mechanism_slug":"parity_then_expansion_gate","role":"Requires a bounded preparation audit and mock administration before the successor displaces the existing examination."}],"nearest_rivals":["Ordinary curriculum review, which can debate intellectual coverage without reconstructing how the predecessor’s constraints enabled an operable assessment","Reading-list reduction, which lowers volume but does not distinguish preserved competencies, required protections, validated improvements, and deferred field ambitions","Examiner norming, which may improve scoring agreement without restraining the successor’s accumulated reading and prerequisite burden","Elective field specialization, which distributes content but does not by itself define a common successor contract or govern the release of pilot constraints"],"negative_tests":{"intervention_falsifier":"Reject the proposed mechanism if independent faculty panels classify sampled additions inconsistently despite explicit dossier fields, or if the compact yields the same required set, prerequisite depth, advising demand, and calibration conflicts as the existing revision process while adding administrative burden.","problem_falsifier":"The diagnosis is absent if no constrained predecessor assessment generated a backlog of postponed coverage, if the successor already has a defended competency core and staged modules, or if the disputed requirements are independently necessary for documented degree obligations and fit within current preparation and administration capacity.","risks":["A competency contract may encode the theoretical preferences of the faculty who draft it.","Estimated preparation hours may obscure differences in language background, prior coursework, disability, or access to advising.","Rotating modules may make expectations less predictable across cohorts.","Quantified budgets may undervalue traditions whose study requires contextual depth that is difficult to represent numerically.","Faculty may disguise preferred coverage as a distinct competency or due-process obligation.","Retaining the existing examination during transition may require additional scheduling and advising capacity.","Excessive restraint may leave documented curricular defects unaddressed."],"strongest_counterevidence":"The restraint diagnosis would be weakened if the pilot’s bounded portfolio demonstrably omits competencies required by the program’s stated degree contract or creates inequitable assessment conditions, and if mock administrations show that the broader successor remains preparable, calibratable, accessible, and administratively reversible within current capacity."},"next_evidence_step":"In one bounded workshop, select 24 proposed successor requirements spanning theory families, literary traditions, methods, and examination formats. For each, identify the pilot constraint that excluded it; classify it as preserved competency, obligation, defect repair, validated improvement, coverage expansion, experimental format, or parked ambition; and estimate prerequisites, reading hours, advising demand, prompt dependencies, and scoring changes. Assemble a paper launch portfolio under provisional budgets, draft two representative prompts, and have two examiner pairs independently apply the scoring contract to three anonymized sample responses. Record classification agreement, prerequisite depth, total preparation load, scoring divergences, and whether the current examination remains a viable fallback; make no program change during this step.","observable_state":"Successor planning documents contain an expanding required reading list, additional theory families, new methodological expectations, and multiple proposed examination modes; requirements lack work-class and release-tier labels; prerequisite chains and total preparation hours are unrecorded; advisers give differing accounts of expected coverage; scorer-calibration needs and transition rules are undocumented; and additions are repeatedly justified as correcting what the pilot left out.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","problem":"A graduate literature program is replacing a successful, deliberately bounded pilot qualifying examination in literary theory. The pilot used a compact portfolio and a small set of prompts to assess close reading, reconstruction of theoretical arguments, comparison of concepts, and application to literary works. Once the successor receives full-program authority, faculty proposals add further critical schools, global traditions, historical debates, genres, media forms, methodological competencies, language expectations, and examination formats. The pilot’s postponed coverage ambitions are becoming simultaneous core requirements, threatening the coherence and operability of the assessment that the successor is meant to institutionalize.","proposal_index":2,"remaining_contrastive_claim":"Conditional on a bounded predecessor examination having succeeded while generating deferred coverage requests, preserving its useful constraint functions and staging those requests should maintain a distinguishable competency core that reading-list reduction or examiner norming alone does not represent; this remains an untested structural claim without an asserted effect size.","revision_record":{"claim_changes":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Created an independent second opportunity centered on successor qualifying-exam design rather than publication infrastructure","Specified a distinct affected objective, causal path, bounded evidence step, decision authority, reversible transition, and falsification conditions","Mapped predecessor constraint memory, ambition triage, complexity budgeting, staged release, and launchability to literary-theory assessment"]},"schema_version":1,"structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Successful but constrained predecessor","domain_realization":"A pilot literary-theory examination whose compact portfolio and limited prompt set made close reading and theory application preparable and assessable."},{"archetype_element":"Released predecessor constraints","domain_realization":"Program-wide authorization removes the pilot’s limits on coverage, faculty participation, reading load, and examination formats."},{"archetype_element":"Deferred ambition stockpile","domain_realization":"Previously omitted schools, traditions, debates, media, methods, language expectations, and assessment modes return as candidates for simultaneous inclusion."},{"archetype_element":"Predecessor constraint memory","domain_realization":"A record distinguishes harmful exclusions from limits that supported coherent preparation, advising, prompt comparability, and scorer calibration."},{"archetype_element":"Successor core contract","domain_realization":"A competency contract preserves close reading, argument reconstruction, concept comparison, justified application, accessibility, and due process at launch."},{"archetype_element":"Ambition triage gate","domain_realization":"Coverage dossiers identify each addition’s distinct competency, overlap, prerequisites, reading demand, advising burden, scoring implications, and release tier."},{"archetype_element":"Complexity and scope budget","domain_realization":"Caps govern required reading hours, concept families, prerequisite depth, examination modes, advising demand, and calibration sessions."},{"archetype_element":"Staged successor release ladder","domain_realization":"Core launch requirements are separated from rotating coverage modules, experimental formats, and parked ambitions with explicit reconsideration triggers."},{"archetype_element":"Launchability invariant and escape path","domain_realization":"A preparation audit, mock administration, scorer-calibration check, cohort transition rule, and retained current examination precede replacement."}],"title":"Qualifying-Exam Successor Compact for Literary Theory","version":0}