The Cafeteria Data Paragraph
A student drafts a paragraph arguing that the school should extend lunch by ten minutes. The draft reads: "Many students say lunch is too short. I surveyed 30 students in my advisory, and 24 said they felt rushed. Some students skip the salad bar because the line is long. According to a 2019 district report, average lunch periods in our region run 25 minutes, and ours is 22. Students who feel rushed may eat less healthy food. Therefore, the school should extend lunch by ten minutes." A peer reviewer says the paragraph "has evidence" and should score well on Development and Support. You are asked to evaluate whether the evidence actually supports the claim as written.
1. Identify the strongest and weakest pieces of support in the paragraph, and explain why one is stronger than the other.
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The strongest support is the district report comparing 22 minutes to a 25-minute regional average, because it is an external, verifiable figure that directly establishes the gap the claim addresses. The survey of 30 advisory students is weaker: it is a small, self-selected convenience sample from one advisory, and the question asked about feeling rushed, not about time. The salad-bar line detail is an unsupported causal guess. Strength here is not "has numbers" but relevance plus reliability: the district figure measures the same quantity the claim is about (minutes), while the survey measures a feeling and cannot by itself justify a specific ten-minute change.
2. The claim asks for a ten-minute extension, but the evidence shows only a three-minute gap versus the regional average. Write a revised sentence or two that makes the support and the claim consistent, and explain the change.
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Revision: "Our lunch period is 22 minutes, three minutes below the 25-minute regional average cited in the 2019 district report; extending lunch to at least the regional average would close that gap, and a ten-minute extension would exceed it." The original jumped from a three-minute deficit to a ten-minute remedy with no bridge. The revision either narrows the claim (match the average) or explicitly acknowledges that ten minutes goes beyond the cited evidence and needs separate justification. A scorer rewards a writer whose conclusion is proportional to the evidence; overclaiming is a Development and Support weakness even when the facts are accurate.