No stardate given: As the Cerritos responds to a distress call, Captain Freeman abandons Rutherford, Tendi, Mariner and Boimler on a relay station. They are rescued after six hour. Some time later, Pandronian drill instructor named Shari yn Yem comes aboard to evaluate the crew. The ranks are going to switch roles in holographic scenarios, with the lower deckers taking over bridge crew tasks, and vice versa. Mariner, Tendi and Rutherford, however, fail the test. The rest of the crew, including the senior officers, don't perform well either. Even the common exercise of bridge crew and lower decks to get the Cerritos out of Spacedock utterly fails. Only Boimler passes his test, a Borg scenario. But he starts over again and again to achieve a higher score. Despite or just because of their failure, Freeman and Mariner think that the drill was meant as a teambuilding event. But Shari yn Yem reveals that she picked the Cerritos with her underperforming crew on purpose to fail the test, to justify her own job. To ensure this result, she manipulated many of the scenarios to be unsolvable. Once the whole program has completed, Yem will transfer the result to Starfleet and recommend to reassign the whole crew. But Boimler's drill is still running. Although he is just about to achieve a score of 100%, he continues the fight against the Borg, in order to buy the Cerritos crew time. Freeman then orders the ship to approach a crystalline entity and later a black hole, to scare Yem and make her revise her evaluation. The instructor eventually gives in. As Boimler returns from his simulation, he is under the impression that he has actually been assimilated to "Excretus of Borg" but is expected to make a full recovery.

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