Risk Assessment & Success Criteria

Risk Assessment

Risk	Likelihood	Mitigation
Catastrophic forgetting	Medium	Keep base model, A/B test before switching
Training data too small	High	Start with templates + math, expand iteratively
Overfitting to training examples	Medium	Use validation set, check generalization
VRAM insufficient for 14B QLoRA	Low	Fall back to 7B, or reduce batch size to 1
Time sink with marginal gains	Medium	Set hard cutoff: if A- doesn’t become A+ in 2 rounds, stop

Risk

Likelihood

Mitigation

Catastrophic forgetting

Medium

Keep base model, A/B test before switching

Training data too small

High

Start with templates + math, expand iteratively

Overfitting to training examples

Medium

Use validation set, check generalization

VRAM insufficient for 14B QLoRA

Low

Fall back to 7B, or reduce batch size to 1

Time sink with marginal gains

Medium

Set hard cutoff: if A- doesn’t become A+ in 2 rounds, stop