This assignment is due at 5:00pm on March 16th and will be graded by your TA and your WRAP instructor. Submit your write-up via our submission site, not via Gradescope.
You will receive feedback on Critique #1 well before this assignment is due (hopefully around March 7th).

Overview of Critique Assignments

As you know, in 6.033 you'll complete a series of three critiques, designed to build analytical and communication skills. The first critique required you to understand and assess a distributed system based on an analytical framework presented in the critique worksheet. In this critique, you'll use your answers to a similar worksheet to write a 2-3 page critique of the system. The third critique will take the form of a peer review of another team's Design Project Report. You'll receive instruction about each of these critiques as the semester progresses.

This Critique

For this critique, you should evaluate and assess MapReduce using the critique worksheet (.docx). This worksheet walks you through the process of analyzing the system described lecture and in the textbook.

After filling in the worksheet, use the following guidelines to organize your analysis into a 2-3 page critique of MapReduce. Your audience is a community of peers who have not read the paper.

Before beginning to write, think about how you might organize your critique. You might assess each module in turn, or each design goal. You might order design goals by importance (e. g. most to least important) or by strength (strongest to weakest-or the reverse!). Use your introduction to forecast and your conclusion to recap.

The critique should be approximately 750-900 words. You should familiarize yourself with the rubric to understand the specific elements we will use to evaluate your writing (your TA will also be grading this assignment, for technical content).

Submit your completed critique using our submission site (not Gradescope). Again, this assignment is due at 5:00pm on March 16th, not 11:59pm.

Examples of Good Critiques

For your reference, here are two examples of critiques (of different systems) from previous examples: