Unit 0 activity: Introduction and how to use this course

Release candidate. The unit videos are added in the first release.

Time: about 10 minutes. Working alone is fine.

You need somewhere to keep written work for the rest of the course — a document, a notebook, a file. This activity produces its first entry.

Why this activity exists

The learning contract says responsibility for a piece of work stays with you. That is easy to agree with and easy to forget the moment an output arrives looking finished. Writing down, in advance, one specific thing you intend to check makes the commitment concrete enough to be kept — and specific enough to notice when you have broken it.

Part 1 — write the sentence (5 minutes)

Think about a real piece of work you have coming up, or one you finished recently, where you have used or might use an AI system. Coursework, a summary, a piece of code, an email, a set of references, a revision plan — anything real.

Write one sentence in this shape:

In [the piece of work], I will verify [the specific thing] rather than trust it, by [the specific check].

Three rules for the sentence:

  1. Name a specific artefact, not a category. "The three references it gave me" beats "the sources".
  2. Name a check that could actually fail. If there is no result that would make you say "that is wrong, I need to fix it", it is not a check.
  3. Keep yourself as the subject. The sentence describes something you will do, not something you hope the tool will get right.

Two examples of the shape, so you can see the difference the rules make:

Write your own. One sentence is enough; two is fine if the check needs a clause of its own.

Part 2 — name what you are not checking (2 minutes)

Underneath your sentence, add one line naming something in the same piece of work that you have decided not to check, and why that is a reasonable decision.

This is not a trick. Checking everything is not possible and pretending otherwise produces a policy nobody follows. The skill is deciding deliberately, and being able to say afterwards what your decision was. Unit 3 gives you a way to make that decision systematically.

Part 3 — get your self-check working (3 minutes)

The checkpoints run in the browser or in a terminal. Pick one now, before you need it under time pressure, and confirm it runs.

In the browser. Open any unit page and scroll to the end: its checkpoints are there, and answering them records your progress. progress.html holds all of them at once. If you were given a link to the course website, use that; if you downloaded a release, open dist/site/index.html — in most browsers it works straight from a file, with no internet connection (if a checkpoint will not record there, see "If something does not work" in this unit's reading).

In a terminal. From The verification lab and self-check, run:

python3 selfcheck.py list

You should see every checkpoint in the course, grouped by unit, with your status against each.

If neither runs, sort it out now rather than at Unit 8, where the checkpoints start doing real work. The browser needs no installation and is the quickest thing to try. If you are taking this course through an institution, ask whoever is running it; otherwise the contact address on the authors page will reach someone.

Now take the checkpoints

cp00-contract asks one question about the learning contract. cp00-what-this-needs asks what the course assumes of you — it is here rather than in Unit 6 so that you find out before you arrive at the derivation, and so that if the answer is unwelcome you can still choose a different route cheaply.

python3 selfcheck.py run cp00-contract
python3 selfcheck.py run cp00-what-this-needs  # or in the browser

Run them from The verification lab and self-check if you are using the command line. If you get it wrong, read the feedback rather than just retrying — it names the specific confusion involved, and that confusion is a common one worth having named.

Then keep your verification sentence somewhere you will find it again. On the complete route, Unit 18 asks you to look back at it and say honestly whether you kept it; on a route that includes Unit 17, it goes into your evidence pack there.

Marking guidance — open this once you have done the activity, to check your own work

There is no single correct answer to this activity. There is, however, a clear difference between a sentence you could keep and one you could not, and that difference is what to look for.

Marking your own work

Read your sentence back and ask three questions.

1. Could someone else tell whether I did it?

If a classmate read your sentence and then looked at your finished work, could they say whether the check happened? "I will make sure it is accurate" fails this. "I will recompute the conversion on paper and compare to three significant figures" passes it. Put differently: does the check leave something behind that another person could repeat and get the same result -- a recomputed value, a page reference, a test they can rerun? That is what this course calls a certificate.

2. Is there an outcome that would count as failure?

Name it. If your check cannot come out badly, it is a reassurance, not a check. A useful test: finish the sentence "…and if that check fails, I will ___". If you cannot finish it, tighten the check.

3. Am I the one doing the work?

Sentences of the form "I will use a better prompt so the output is reliable" describe a hope about the tool. Sentences of the form "I will look up each reference in the library catalogue" describe an action of yours. The second kind is what the contract asks for.

If your sentence fails one of these, rewrite it now. It takes a minute and the rewritten version is the one Unit 17, on a route that includes it, will ask you about.

For Part 2 — the thing you decided not to check — a good answer names something specific and gives a reason connected to consequence: the error would be obvious, or cheap to fix, or the passage is going to be rewritten anyway. A weak answer is "I will check everything", which is not a decision, or "the rest is probably fine", which is a guess dressed as a policy.

Five ways the sentence usually goes wrong

Nothing here is graded. What this sentence is for is to be the first entry in your evidence pack, and the thing you look back at in Unit 18 if your route includes it. A strong one names an artefact at the level of a single claim, number, function or citation; states the method of the check, not just its intention; and implies a failure condition.

If yours matches a row below, the last column is the fix:

Pattern Example What to do instead
Category, not artefact "I will check the facts." Say which fact, in which paragraph. Specificity is the whole exercise.
Check with no possible failure "I will read it through carefully." Say what a bad outcome would look like. Reading is attention, not verification.
Responsibility displaced onto the tool "I will ask it to double-check itself." A system's second output about its first is generated the same way as the first. Unit 3 explains why this is not independent evidence.
Disclosure offered in place of checking "I will declare that I used AI." A declaration says how the work was made; the work itself cannot confirm that, and it does not make the work right. Add one where a rule requires it, but the contract asks for the check. This is precisely the confusion cp00-contract names.
Whole-output verification "I will verify everything it produces." Not a policy anyone keeps. Part 2 exists to make the trade-off explicit rather than silent.

If your sentence fell into the third or fourth row, the distinction between provenance and correctness is worth settling before you start Unit 3, because the triage activity there assumes it.

The checkpoint

This unit has two checkpoints, cp00-contract and cp00-what-this-needs. The question, options, correct answer and feedback of each are defined once, and the browser self-check and the terminal both read that one definition, so they ask the same question and give the same feedback.

What cp00-contract is testing is the distinction between disclosing how work was produced and being answerable for whether it is right. If you get it wrong, read the feedback before looking anything up: what it says about the option you chose is more useful than the right answer, because it names the confusion rather than replacing it.

Run it in either place:

python3 selfcheck.py run cp00-contract  # or in the browser

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