True/False/Justify: The Four-Day Week Pilot
A teacher is reviewing a True/False/Justify item. The text is a 260-word report on a four-day-week pilot at a software company. The relevant lines are: 'The pilot covered 42 employees. Output, measured by closed tickets, rose 8%. Two teams missed deadlines in week three, but both recovered after the trial's coordinator reassigned two client accounts. Managers voted 6–1 to extend the trial; the dissenting manager worried about clients who expect Friday replies.' Item: 'The trial was extended because every manager was satisfied.' A student marks True and justifies: 'Managers voted 6–1 to extend the trial.' The mark scheme says False, because one manager dissented. The teacher must decide whether the student gets the mark, and how to explain the difference between a vote to extend and unanimous satisfaction. The class has been practising 'absolute' words (every, all, always) and concession clauses.
1. Does the student earn the mark? Explain the two separate problems in the answer.
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No mark. The verdict is wrong, and the justification would not support it even if the verdict were right. The statement has two claims: the trial was extended, and every manager was satisfied. The text supports the first (6–1 vote) but contradicts the second: one manager dissented. The student has quoted the evidence for extension and ignored the numerical split. There is also a causal problem: the statement says 'because every manager was satisfied', but the text gives the vote, not the motive. A unanimous vote would still not prove satisfaction, since managers can extend a trial to collect more data. In True/False/Justify items, the justification must be evidence that entails the verdict; here it entails the opposite. The student needs to treat 'every' as an absolute quantifier and check it against any number that is not total.
2. Write a model False justification in no more than 20 words that would earn full credit.
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Model: 'False: the managers voted 6–1, so one manager did not support extending the trial.' This is 15 words and earns full credit because it states the verdict and cites the specific textual fact that contradicts 'every'. 'Did not support' is safer than 'was not satisfied': the text reports a vote, not a satisfaction survey. The number 6–1 is the key detail; without it, the justification is an assertion. The sentence is also in the student's own words, which matters if the rubric penalises copying.
3. A second student writes: 'The pilot proves that a four-day week always raises output.' Identify two inference errors and rephrase the claim to match the evidence.
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Two errors. First, 'proves' and 'always' overgeneralise from a single pilot of 42 employees: the design can suggest a local effect, not a universal law. Second, the claim substitutes one narrow metric (closed tickets) for output as a whole and ignores the two teams that missed deadlines, even though they later recovered. The 8% rise is compatible with lower quality or unpaid overtime, neither of which the passage rules out. A defensible rephrase is: 'In this 42-person pilot, the number of closed tickets rose by 8%, although two teams missed deadlines before recovering.' This keeps the sample size, the metric and the counter-evidence. The lesson is to match the strength of the verb ('suggests', 'indicates') to the strength of the design.