# Finance — steal this assignment
_EL3vate 2026 · Day 8 · Part 11 of 15 · build 3dfcaff_

## Try it Tuesday (90 minutes)
90 minutes, one decision that has two sides to it — a lease renewal, an acquisition price, a covenant a lender wants and a borrower does not. Minutes 0–5: split the room. Half model the decision as the party who wants it to happen; half model it as the party who has to be talked into it. Neither half sees the other’s work. Minutes 5–35: each side builds its case with the prompt or the embedded break-even demo and commits, in writing, to the one number it will defend. Minutes 35–80: both numbers go up side by side, against a single question — what accounts for the distance between them? Work the gap down input by input until it closes or the room agrees it cannot. Minutes 80–90: what gets handed in is the reconciliation — the short list of inputs that produced the spread, which of them a filing or a quote could settle, and the one that is a view about the future no model will ever decide. Finance students should leave having watched two honest analysts with the same tool arrive at different numbers, and knowing that saying precisely why is the professional act.

## The assignment
**Make it (Laser cut · engrave).** Physical decision cards or a data object for a simulation: a term structure or a risk distribution rendered as something you can hold and compare side by side. Useful precisely because it slows the reading down.

**Build it (AI chat · no code).** A working interactive model for a real decision, built live. The assignment is not the model. It is the sensitivity analysis and the written defense of every assumption the model needed to make.

## 5-week plan
- **Wk 1.** Pick a real decision with public filings. Students list every assumption required, before building anything.
- **Wk 2.** Build the interactive model with AI in class. Break it deliberately: what input makes the conclusion flip? By the end of the week the term structure or risk distribution the cards will render is fixed — lay the cards out from it.
- **Wk 3.** Cut file for the physical comparison cards due the first day of this week. The sensitivity write-up runs while they are cut and engraved.
- **Wk 4.** Teams rehearse the defense and mark which assumption they expect to be attacked. The cards come back this week.
- **Wk 5.** Defense session. Another team’s job is to find the assumption that carries the whole result.

## What this replaces
- **Replaces:** The valuation or capital-budgeting spreadsheet submitted as the answer.
- **What is lost:** The hand-built modeling mechanics and formula fluency.
- **What is gained:** With AI building the model in minutes, class time moves to the actual professional skill — defending assumptions and finding the one the conclusion hinges on — instead of grading spreadsheet arithmetic a tool now does.

## Where AI is bad at this
A model builds a financial model that runs cleanly and hides its load-bearing assumptions — silently setting overhead to zero, assuming no ramp-up, holding margins constant, and presenting a confident break-even without surfacing that one uncertain input drives the result. Its output looks decision-ready while burying exactly the assumptions a sensitivity analysis is supposed to expose.

## Rubric
| Criterion | Weight | What it assesses |
|---|---|---|
| Fidelity to the assigned side | 25% | The team argued the position it was dealt in good faith, choosing inputs a real party on that side would actually put its name to, rather than drifting toward the middle to look even-handed. |
| Decomposition of the spread | 35% | The distance between the two numbers is traced to named inputs and quantified — this much of the gap comes from the rent line, this much from the ramp — instead of being written off as a difference in outlook. |
| Evidence versus judgment | 25% | Separates the inputs a filing, a quote or a comparable could settle from the ones that rest on a view about the future, and says plainly which is which. |
| Refusal to split the difference | 15% | Moves off a number when the other side's evidence beats it and holds when it does not; an average of the two opening positions earns nothing. |

## Starter prompt
> Build a single self-contained HTML page with an interactive model for this decision: [describe the decision]. Include sliders for every input that matters. Show the output updating live, and display the break-even point prominently. Then list every assumption you had to make to build it, and tell me which single assumption the conclusion is most sensitive to.

## Budget & logistics
- **Instructor prep:** 1.5 hours
- **Class time:** 90 minutes
- **Per-student cost:** $0 for the Tuesday version; roughly $8–15 per team in laser stock **[unverified]** for engraved decision and comparison cards in the five-week build.
- **Fabrication file due:** First day of Week 3, in a five-week plan — the comparison cards render the term structure or risk distribution the week-2 model produces, so they are laid out at the close of week 2 and the cut file goes in the moment week 3 opens. PACE quotes 7–10 business days (up to 14 calendar days), which clears with the week-5 defense exactly 14 days out.
- **Calendar dependency:** Model-building needs no lead time. This plan is five weeks, not four, and the deadline sits at the start of week 3 rather than the end of it — both deliberately. The cards render numbers that do not exist until the week-2 model does, which rules out the start-of-week-2 deadline every other fabrication assignment here uses; and an end-of-week-3 file would leave only 8 calendar days before a week-5 defense, which the up-to-14-calendar-day cut turnaround does not fit. Start of week 3 to a week-5 session is 14 days, which does. A four-week version would hand out cards after the defense they exist to inform.

## Three sizes
- **One session:** The 90-minute two-sided session producing a written reconciliation of the spread between the room's two numbers; no fabrication.
- **5 weeks:** The seeded plan runs five weeks, not four, because the comparison cards render numbers that do not exist until the model does. Week 1, pick a real decision with public filings and list every assumption it requires. Week 2, build the model with AI and break it deliberately; by Friday the term structure or risk distribution is fixed, so the cards get laid out from it. Week 3, cut file in on day one, with the sensitivity write-up running while the cards are engraved. Week 4, teams rehearse the defense and mark the assumption they expect to be attacked; the cards return. Week 5, the defense session. The extra week is the cut turnaround, not padding.
- **One semester:** A full decision case with public filings — assumption inventory, an AI-built model stress-tested repeatedly, fabricated comparison cards, and a defense session where another team must find the assumption carrying the result.

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_PACE · Shidler College of Business · University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa · pace.shidler.hawaii.edu/maker_
_All fifteen assignments, the demos and every handout: https://el3vate.vercel.app_