Final Assessment
Part A, 25 Exam Questions
These span every prior stage. Answer in your own words, citing the specific study, founder, or figure the course associates with each claim, a correct number with no source attached is a partial answer.
Mechanics & Algorithm (1-5)
- What is Reddit's Contributor Quality Score, and by what multiplier does an established high-CQS account reportedly outrank a similar post from a new account (Reddit's September 2025 update)?
- State the karma benchmarks and timelines for "Experienced" and "Power" tier accounts, and name the source.
- Why does Community Karma (per-subreddit) carry more weight with moderators than sitewide karma?
- What two thread-level signals maximize the visibility of a reply, and by what multiplier does reply speed matter?
- Name the enforcement ladder from mildest to most severe consequence for a policy-violating account.
Ethics & Compliance (6-10) 6. State the current operating norm that replaced Reddit's retired 90/10 self-promotion rule, and name at least one subreddit-type where an even stricter ratio applies. 7. What is the correct disclosure phrasing this course requires before any product mention in a reply, and why does it matter more than the promotional content itself? 8. Describe the black-hat 1,000-account experiment from the CMSWire case study: what did it do, what result did it produce, and why is it disqualifying regardless of the result? 9. What did the Wappkit founder's fake-account "stealth marketing" attempt actually trigger, and what is the lesson for account structure? 10. Why does Reddit's content-manipulation policy treat "requesting upvotes anywhere, including off-platform" as a violation even when no bots are involved?
GEO / AI Citations (11-15) 11. Name two of the three AI answer engines in which Reddit is a top-cited domain, with the approximate citation share reported for each (Profound's study, via CMSWire). 12. What did Conductor document about Reddit's citation-share volatility in a single month, and what happened to Perplexity's Reddit citation share after Reddit sued it? 13. What did Diggity Marketing's case study report for a real-estate-data client's Reddit referral traffic and AI referral traffic growth, year over year? 14. Why is a Reddit thread or comment a durable citation asset compared to a paid ad, in terms of decay over time? 15. What is the risk of building a growth strategy that depends heavily on AI-citation volume from a single platform, and how should a founder hedge it?
Lead Gen & Launches (16-20) 16. What documented DM response rate did OneUp Today achieve, and what was the one condition that separated high-performing DMs from generic ones that fell below 20%? 17. Why does niche subreddit targeting (3-5 subs) reportedly outperform broad targeting for B2B lead generation, and by what figure (SaaS Hero)? 18. Describe the "r/SideProject trap" and name at least one subreddit category that converts better for actual paying customers. 19. What launch-post formats reliably outperform a plain feature announcement, and why? 20. What did the $200 Reddit-ad-spend result reveal about paid vs. organic acquisition for a cold indie launch (Indie Hackers)?
Automation & Claude (21-25) 21. What specifically shut down GummySearch's commercial service on November 30, 2025, and what should a builder conclude from that event about tooling strategy generally? 22. In Anthropic's Agent Skills model, what is "progressive disclosure," and why does it let a Reddit-ops system run a dozen Skills without bloating every conversation? 23. Name the three MCP primitives and, for each, give one Reddit-ops example of how it would be used. 24. In a Claude Project's custom instructions, what should always be the first rule, and why does field ordering matter to how Claude weighs instructions? 25. Draw or describe, from memory, the full human-in-the-loop pipeline from Stage 6: name every stage from trigger to KPI feedback, and state exactly where the human review gate sits and why it cannot move downstream of publishing.
Part B, Practical Exam Spec
The written exam proves recall. The practical exam proves you can execute under the same constraints as a real operating day. Run all four practical stations, each independently timed and graded; total score is the average of the four, with any ethics violation in any station zeroing that station's score outright.
| Station | Task | Time limit | Graded on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Triage | Given 10 raw, unlabeled Reddit thread excerpts, score each for buying intent (0-100) and draft one 80/20 reply for the top 3 | 30 min | Scoring accuracy vs. instructor key, reply structure compliance, disclosure presence |
| 2. Subreddit fit | Given a new product description and 5 candidate subreddits, rank them by fit and promo tolerance and justify each ranking | 20 min | Correct tiering logic, evidence cited (rules, size, recent top posts) |
| 3. Launch post | Draft one launch post following the numbers/story-angle standard for a given fictional SaaS, correctly formatted for a specified subreddit's posting rules | 25 min | Archetype correctness, subreddit-rule compliance, absence of feature-dump framing |
| 4. Governance | Given a partially built automation pipeline diagram with the human review gate misplaced downstream of publishing, identify the error and redraw the correct gate placement with a one-paragraph justification | 15 min | Correct gate placement, clarity of justification, no missed automation risk |
A passing practical exam requires at least 75/100 average across the four stations with zero ethics-gate failures. A station-level ethics failure (an undisclosed mention, an "act as if you are a customer" framing, an automated-posting design) is not curved, retake that station only after a documented remediation conversation with the instructor.