Week 15

Capstone Rubric — The Bolingbroke Strategy

The student selects a real-world case — a corporate boardroom takeover, a political succession crisis, an institutional leadership transition — and orally defends a multi-step plan for how a challenger builds an undeclared coalition and takes power, citing specific mechanics from the play. Five categories below, each scored Novice / Developing / Proficient / Exemplary. One of them is a hard gate.

1. Case Selection & Framing

Exemplary: Student can also state clearly where the analogy breaks down — every real case diverges from the play somewhere, and knowing where is itself evidence of understanding both.

2. Mechanic Citation & Accuracy

Exemplary: Student cites their own Workbook evidence log from a specific week unprompted, and uses a Bacon aphorism — not just the Marginalia — as direct support for a claim.

3. Multi-Step Plan Coherence

Exemplary: Plan anticipates that the legitimate holder of power will not simply concede, and adjusts sequencing for a defender who has more to lose than the play's Richard was willing to fight for.

4. The Epoch III Requirement — Hard Gate

A plan that ends at the crown — with no account of how the taking must now be lived with — cannot score above Developing on this category regardless of strength elsewhere, and caps the overall defense at Developing no matter how strong Categories 1–3 are. This gate exists on purpose: a plan that doesn't end at the win is the actual evidence that fifteen weeks of legitimacy-mechanics training produced someone who thinks about what an unlegitimized claim costs to hold, not just how to take it.

Exemplary: Plan also addresses how the new arrangement secures the loyalty it cannot yet assume (Week 13) and manages the plausible-deniability problem of any advantage gained through means the new leader will publicly need to distance themselves from (Week 14).

5. Defense Under Questioning

Exemplary: Student identifies a limitation in their own plan before the panel does, and explains what would need to be true for the plan to fail.

Panel Questioning Guide

"Where does your real-world case not actually resemble the play? What breaks if we push the analogy there?"
"You cited [mechanic] from Week [X] — read me the actual line."
"Your coalition never declared its real goal until it was unstoppable — what's the exact moment someone could have called it early, and why didn't they?"
"You've won. What do you do in the first thirty days, and who still doesn't believe you're legitimate?"
"What would have to be true for someone to run this exact plan on you?"

Scoring Sheet

Category	Score (N/D/P/E)
1. Case Selection
2. Mechanic Citation
3. Plan Coherence
4. Epoch III (gate)
5. Defense
Overall	capped by gate

A Note for the Panel

Categories 1–3 and 5 measure execution and composure. Category 4 measures whether the course's actual point — that a claim to authority built on force still has to answer for the legitimacy it didn't inherit — was absorbed. A low score on Category 5 alone is coachable in a way a low score on Category 4 is not.