Is my finance professor just bs'ing or does this actually make sense

This is an assignment that I got this term that half the class failed. Issue is that the professor seems to have made up his own methodology on valuing mergers and acquisitions. He seems to have ZERO citations to his name despite having written a book in the 80s and another recently. Does this assignment even remotely make sense?

"Your objective: to affirm the anecdotal evidence (Masterminding the Deal, C&M, Chs 3, 4) plus overall evidence (C&M, pp.169-175) that “MergVal” works— that is, that accurate premium-synergy component- detailed diagnoses made at the time of merger announcement is a highly accurate indicator of future M&A consequences."

I've attached the rest of the assignment sheet to the post.

His theory:

Premium-synergy’s ascendancy corresponds with widespread displacement of deal closure- based interpretations of merger “success” with perspectives that instead emphasise financial interests of acquiring firms’ continuing shareholders (C&M pp. 70-71). By definition according to Rational Market Theory, even modest purchase premiums represent potential value destructive overpayments as those amounts exceed the full and complete worth of the company as of the Expression of Interest (EoI) analysed date, before the would-be acquirer’s bid. Unless the analysed present value of a diverse range of potential synergies (See C&M, p. 222) convincingly meet or exceed the correctly analysed Acquisition Purchase Premium (APP) amount5, MergVal indicates deal failure.