Inherited curricula are often subjected to targeted local interventions before more ambitious redesign is considered. Yet it remains unclear whether such baseline-near repairs can materially recover the performance of a rigid curricular architecture, or whether they merely produce limited local relief without changing the regime of performance. This paper examines that question in the case of the 2005 Civil Engineering curriculum at FACET-UNT through a comparative analysis of two intervention families: local synchronisation relief (Campaign 003) and prerequisite surgery (Campaign 004). The results show that local repair does improve the baseline, but only marginally. In Campaign 003, the best surgical candidate improved confidence-adjusted return (CAR) from −1.7516 to −1.7434, a gain of +0.0082, while Winner Stability remained unchanged at 0.75. In Campaign 004, prerequisite surgery produced a near-identical gain at the rule-adjustment level (CAR from −1.7516 to −1.7436, delta +0.0080), whereas the more aggressive bypass candidate did not outperform the repaired comparison point and remained more exposed to packaging friction. Taken together, the findings indicate that the inherited curriculum is partially repairable but not meaningfully recoverable through local intervention alone. The contribution of the paper is not to show that the baseline cannot be improved, but to establish that its repairability is shallow: targeted local modifications yield real but limited gains and fail to overcome the structural floor imposed by the underlying architecture.
Hugo Roger Paz (Mon,) studied this question.