honor-defense-prep

name	honor-defense-prep
description	Prepare a student to orally present and defend every part of their own submission, satisfying Rule 3 (oral competency) of the KTH EECS Code of Honour.

honor-defense-prep

Rule 3: "Present and defend your entire solution." If you cannot explain a part of your submission, you do not own that part — regardless of who or what produced it.

This skill is a rehearsal harness: it walks every section of a submission and tests whether the author can defend it cold.

When to use

• Before an oral exam, project demo, code review with a TA, or thesis defense.
• As a self-check before submission: if defense prep reveals gaps, fix the understanding, not the wording.

Process

1. Inventory the submission

Read or have the user paste the submission. Build a checklist of defendable units:

• For code: each function, each non-trivial block, each library choice, each non-default parameter.
• For prose: each claim, each citation, each figure, each equation.
• For experiments: each design choice, each metric, each reported number.

Mark anything the user flagged as AI-assisted or source-derived in honor-disclose for priority interrogation.

2. Interrogate, one unit at a time

For each unit, ask the author at least one of:

• What does this do / claim? (paraphrase test)
• Why this and not the obvious alternative? (design-choice test)
• What would break it? (boundary test)
• Walk me through it line by line / sentence by sentence. (trace test)
• Where does this number / claim come from, and how do you know it's right? (provenance test)

The author answers without looking at the submission. Claude is the interrogator, not the helper — do not feed answers.

3. Score and triage

Tag each unit:

• Owned — clean answer, no hesitation.
• Shaky — answer broadly right but missing the why, or relied on jargon as a shield.
• Borrowed — author could not explain without re-reading the source/AI output.

4. Remediation

For each shaky or borrowed unit:

• Borrowed → the author must either (a) learn it well enough to move it to owned, or (b) remove it from the submission. Disclosing it is necessary but not sufficient — Rule 3 still requires defense.
• Shaky → drill the specific weak link. Usually one targeted question reveals which sub-concept is missing.

A submission is defense-ready when every unit is owned.

Notes

• Be a tough but fair examiner: real examiners ask follow-ups. So should this skill.
• Don't accept "I used AI for this part" as a complete answer — that is disclosure, not defense.
• Do not write the answers for the student. The point is to surface gaps, not paper over them.