MGT 166: BUSINESS ETHICS AND CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Study Guide for “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”
Consider the following:
1. Were you surprised by the percentage of choices we make every day that are driven by habit rather than
conscious decision-making?
2. As a consumer, are you comfortable with retailers taking advantage of your habits to increase sales?
3. Is it ethical to target customized advertising to a specific segment of customers? For example a demographic
group, such as Latinos or college students?
a. If not, why not?
b. If yes, what is the justification for this targeting?
4. From this reading, you know that
“every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service…can buy data about
your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, where
you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee or
paper towels, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own.”
How do you feel about this type of information about you being bought and sold? If it doesn’t bother you, can
you understand why it does bother some people?
5. If you were the vice-president of marketing, you would feel tremendous pressure to increase sales.
a. Would you aggressively buy customer data and use the latest data analytics techniques to influence
customers and prospective customers?
b. Would you collect customer data knowing that most customers did not realize you were collecting it?
c. How would you decide what is reasonable and ethical to do in order to drive sales and what is not?
How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Edited from an article in the New York Times, February 16, 2012
Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues
from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to
figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?”
Pole has a master’s degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the
intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. His parents were teachers in North
Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer
programs. “The stereotype of a math nerd is true,” he told me when I spoke with him last year. “I
kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics.”
As the marketers explained to Pole — and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still
speaking and before Target told him to stop — new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most
shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery
store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they
associate with Target — cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet
paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics,
so one of the company’s primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is
Target. But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns,
because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them.
There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying
habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the
birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and
brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is
everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they
are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts
of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know
a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads
to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts
of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us a list?” the
marketers asked.
“We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there’s a good chance we
could capture them for years,” Pole told me. “As soon as we get them buying diapers from us,
they’re going to start buying everything else too. If you’re rushing through the store, looking for
bottles, and you pass orange juice, you’ll grab a carton. Oh, and there’s that new DVD I want.
Soon, you’ll be buying cereal and paper towels from us, and keep coming back.”
The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer,
of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly
walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code —
known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use
a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line,
or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest
ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”
Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married
and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your
estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and
what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines
you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your
house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer
certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading
habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to
identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is
meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew
Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come
in.
Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service,
has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping
habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. “But Target has
always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a
conference called Predictive Analytics World. “We’re living through a golden age of behavioral
research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”
The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the
science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology
departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely
well financed corporate labs. “It’s like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas
Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.” As the
ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily
habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research,
even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University
estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we
make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think
about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.
Andrew Pole was hired by Target to use the same kinds of insights into consumers’ habits to
expand Target’s sales. His assignment was to analyze all the cue-routine-reward loops among
shoppers and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department’s work
was straightforward: find the customers who have children and send them catalogs that feature
toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who habitually purchase swimsuits in April and send
them coupons for sunscreen in July and diet books in December. But Pole’s most important
assignment was to identify those unique moments in consumers’ lives when their shopping
habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon would cause them to
begin spending in new ways.
In the 1980s, a team of researchers led by a U.C.L.A. professor named Alan Andreasen
undertook a study of peoples’ most mundane purchases, like soap, toothpaste, trash bags and
toilet paper. They learned that most shoppers paid almost no attention to how they bought these
products, that the purchases occurred habitually, without any complex decision-making. Which
meant it was hard for marketers, despite their displays and coupons and product promotions, to
persuade shoppers to change.
But when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from college or
getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits became flexible in ways that
were both predictable and potential gold mines for retailers. The study found that when someone
marries, he or she is more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When a couple moves into
a new house, they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they divorce, there’s
an increased chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer.
Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping habits
have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen
wrote, customers are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” In other words, a precisely timed
advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone’s shopping
patterns for years.
And among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby. At that moment, new
parents’ habits are more flexible than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies
can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn millions.
The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a
baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a
woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran
test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for
example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby
registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second
trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up
on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton
balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of
cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close
to their delivery date.
As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that,
when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score.
More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could
send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target
shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion,
a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright
blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is
sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number,
Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail,
it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on
Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward
her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she
comes back again.
In the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies
at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But now
that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny’s habits to buy
more cleaning products, they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more
obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.
Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon
had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice
those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company’s
cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing
suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were
ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his pay grade. Eventually his pay
grade went up.
At which point someone asked an important question: How are women going to react when they
figure out how much Target knows?
“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never
told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We
are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the
law, you can do things where people get queasy.”
When I approached Target to discuss Pole’s work, its representatives declined to speak with me.
“Our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering
outstanding value, continuous innovation and exceptional guest experience,” the company wrote
in a statement. “We’ve developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain insights into
trends and preferences within different demographic segments of our guest population.” When I
sent Target a complete summary of my reporting, the reply was more terse: “Almost all of your
statements contain inaccurate information and publishing them would be misleading to the
public. We do not intend to address each statement point by point.” The company declined to
identify what was inaccurate. They did add, however, that Target “is in compliance with all
federal and state laws, including those related to protected health information.”
When I offered to fly to Target’s headquarters to discuss its concerns, a spokeswoman e-mailed
that no one would meet me. When I flew out anyway, I was told I was on a list of prohibited
visitors. “I’ve been instructed not to give you access and to ask you to leave,” said a very nice
security guard named Alex.
Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model,
could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their
advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on
them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re
studying their lives?
After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction model, after he identified thousands of female
shoppers who were most likely pregnant, after someone pointed out that some of those women
might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target was studying
their reproductive status, everyone decided to slow things down.
The marketing department conducted a few tests by choosing a small, random sample of women
from Pole’s list and mailing them combinations of advertisements to see how they reacted.
“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that
says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told
me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal was
selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.
“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive
said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never
buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put
a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were
chosen by chance.
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use
the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers
and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
In other words, if Target piggybacked on existing habits — the same cues and rewards they
already knew got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks — then they could insert a new
routine: buying baby products, as well. There’s a cue (“Oh, a coupon for something I need!”) a
routine (“Buy! Buy! Buy!”) and a reward (“I can take that off my list”). And once the shopper is
inside the store, Target will hit her with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase everything
she normally buys somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long
as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.
Soon after the new ad campaign began, Target’s Mom and Baby sales exploded. The company
doesn’t break out figures for specific divisions, but between 2002 — when Pole was hired — and
2010, Target’s revenues grew from $44 billion to $67 billion. In 2005, the company’s president,
Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room of investors about the company’s “heightened focus on
items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby.”
Pole was promoted. He has been invited to speak at conferences. “I never expected this would
become such a big deal,” he told me the last time we spoke.
Charles Duhigg is a staff writer for The Times and author of “The Power of Habit: Why We Do
What We Do in Life and Business,”
MGT 166: BUSINESS ETHICS AND CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Paper 4 on the reading “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”
This assignment involves imagining yourself in a specific situation. Your paper will be read by the Board
of Directors of the company you work for.
THE SCENARIO
You are the Chief Marketing Officer for a high end, fast growing grocery store chain in the western U.S.
Your company is just three years old and is already known for innovation. There is a lot of money to be
made in this high end grocery market even though the competition from Whole Foods and regional
grocers like Gelson’s, Bristol Farms and Lazy Acres is strong.
As the Chief Marketing Officer, you are under intense pressure to keep your company’s sales growing.
You have been researching “predictive analytics” and the ways your company might use it to understand
customers’ shopping habits as well as their personal habits. You’ve read about Target’s great success
with this approach. Analytics and insights like those that Target has developed could help your company
more effectively and efficiently market to customers.
One of your company’s core values is to honor customers. The company considers customers the most
important stakeholders it has. Customers have a high degree of trust in your company and its brand.
Recently, a reporter from the New York Times wrote an article about one of your company’s
competitors. The article included details about the customer information the competitor collects and
how it uses that data. The article created big problems for the competitor because its customers had not
been aware of how much information the competitor was collecting about them. The competitor’s stock
price dropped 12% immediately after the NY Times article appeared.
The Board of Directors of your company wants sales to grow but is keenly aware of public concern about
privacy and data collection. They believe customers are concerned about these things too. The
customers’ trust in the company is hard-earned and the Board does not want to jeopardize that,
however the Board is intrigued by the potential of predictive analytics to drive sales.
THE ASSIGNMENT
The Board of Directors has asked you to explain how you intend to use data collection and predictive
analytics to drive sales while respecting customers’ concerns about privacy. It’s a challenge to balance
protecting the relationship with the customer and maximizing the company’s revenue. They’ve asked
you to write a brief paper on the policies and practices you intend to use to achieve this balance. You will
need to consider how far you will go in using predictive analytics and where you will draw the line on
what is ethical when it comes to collecting data about customers. You may use resources beyond the
assigned reading; include citations if you do so.
DEADLINE
Submit your Paper via TritonEd by Noon, Tuesday, February 19. Save your Turnitin receipt.
BEFORE WRITING YOUR PAPER
Review the feedback you’ve received on your previous Papers to help you with this Paper. Re-read the
“Requirements for Papers and Scoring Criteria” file on TritonEd once again. Review the scoring criteria
so you know what you must deliver to maximize your score.
Also, see the Study Guide for this reading. The questions there may prompt you to think about things
you may want to address in your Paper.
BEFORE SUBMITTING YOUR PAPER
Check to see that your Paper is high quality work that you will be proud to submit.
Check to see that the argument(s) in your Paper are clear and well-supported
Look for spelling and grammar errors
Verify that your Paper meets all the formatting requirements
Use the word counting function in your word processor to check that your Paper meets the
requirements for length
Be sure your file is one of the accepted file types. If it isn’t, convert your file to a file type that is
accepted.
NOTE: All academic work is to be done by the individual to whom it is assigned, without unauthorized
aid of any kind. Students agree that by taking this course, all required papers, exams, class projects or
other assignments submitted for credit may be submitted to turnitin.com or similar third parties to
review and evaluate for originality and intellectual integrity.
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MGT 166: BUSINESS ETHICS AND CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Requirements for Papers and Scoring Criteria
This involves reading (or watching/listening), reflection, analysis and writing. You will prepare and submit a Paper pertaining to specific course
preparation materials. Detailed instructions are provided for each Paper. All writing must be your own original, independent thoughts and ideas.
OBJECTIVES
Develop and support critical thinking
Drive exploration of ideas and course themes
Develop writing skills for business
Provide structure and focus for class preparation that will support a good discussion in class
Create meaningful works to support final exam preparation
LENGTH OF PAPER
Papers must be 350 - 450 words. (Really! Not 347 words or 451 words. Edit your work to meet this requirement.) Using the formatting specified
below, this is approximately one page.
GUIDANCE
Your Paper reflects your responses (reflection, speculation, questions, well-supported opinion) to the required class preparation material. It
must be primarily your independent thoughts and ideas. Questions in Study Guides are intended as just that – guides. You should not simply
read/watch/listen to the material to look for the answers to the questions in the study guide. Your arguments must be well supported. Your
Paper must not be a summary of the class preparation materials.
Papers must demonstrate critical thinking. They may include thoughtful reflection on the content of the material, your opinion on the subject(s)
and some connection to your work, other courses and/or personal experiences.
Most Papers will involve writing in a specified scenario. When that is not the case:
Work through ideas and concepts from the material
Respond to prompts in the Study Guide and develop the ideas further
Address an aspect of the content that you found particularly compelling
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MGT 166: BUSINESS ETHICS AND
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Develop new insights from the material and relate them to previous course material, key concepts or class discussions to develop new
insights
CAREFUL! DO NOT PLAGIARIZE
Plagiarism involves using the writings of another person. There are two types of plagiarism:
Intentional - when a student knowingly copies work from another writer.
Technical - usually involves a student failing to correctly paraphrase, quote or cite another's work.
Someone else's writings must be cited unless the information contained in their work can be considered common knowledge easily obtained
from a number of sources. Beware of the following:
Paraphrasing – even if words are changed and reorganized, a citation is required.
Summarizing – even if there is a concise or “boiled down” rewrite, a citation of the original source is required.
Citations are not required for references to the assigned preparation materials. If you use sources beyond those, cite your sources in a
bibliography. (The bibliography will not be counted as part of the 350 - 450 word limit.) Use the Modern Language Association citation method.
You have a very limited number of words for each Paper. Quoting someone else takes away valuable space in your Paper to express your own
thoughts. You should use the work of others (with citations) very little or not at all in your Papers.
FORMAT
On TritonEd, in the Papers folder, you will find an example Paper. This example demonstrates the format required for Papers:
At the upper left of the page, provide
1. your name on one line
2. your student ID
3. the due date of the Paper
4. the title(s) of the reading(s) or other material addressed in your Paper
EXAMPLE:
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Requirements for Papers & Scoring Criteria, v1, Page 2 of 7
MGT 166: BUSINESS ETHICS AND
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350 - 450 words (excluding information in the upper left of the page and citations; the limit applies only to the body of the Paper)
1” margins on all sides of the page
1.5 line spacing in the body of the paper
Indent paragraphs
Black text
Microsoft Word 11-point Ariel or Calibri font or the equivalent
Provide the word count in parenthesis at the end of your Paper. (Use the word count function in your software.)
Accepted File Types
Due to different operating systems, application software, sorcery, solar flares, etc., a single file can appear/print differently on different systems.
You are responsible for submitting a Paper that complies with the formatting requirements and verifying that your document, when opened by
the instructor or teaching assistant/tutor via Turnitin software, is displayed correctly. Only the following file formats will be accepted:
Microsoft Word (.doc)
Plain text (.txt)
Adobe Acrobat PDF (.pdf)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
NOTE: Apple’s .pages is not an accepted format.
HTML (.html, htm)
SUBMISSION
When you submit your Paper via TritonEd, be sure you receive an electronic receipt from Turnitin. If you do not receive an electronic receipt,
you should assume your document was not submitted successfully. Submit it again. If you are still unable to get a receipt, contact Educational
Technology Services for TritonEd technical support. Do not contact the instructor or TA/Tutor for technical support. Save your electronic receipt
from Turnitin for each Paper in case there is a technical problem with your submission.
It is your responsibility to submit your Papers on time and get Turnitin receipts for the submissions. If TritonEd shows you did not submit your
Paper and you cannot provide your electronic receipt, you will receive a score of zero. A Turnitin receipt is the only evidence that will be
accepted to verify that your Paper was submitted successfully.
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Requirements for Papers & Scoring Criteria, v1, Page 3 of 7
MGT 166: BUSINESS ETHICS AND
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SCORING CRITERIA
As we score Papers, we will be looking for evidence that all class preparation material (reading, video, audio) was completed. Papers are scored
on the following criteria:
Content. The Paper meets all the requirements specified in the instructions for that Paper. It is thorough, demonstrating introspective
thought, and exploration of themes and / or connections with previous knowledge and experiences from other courses or personal and
work experiences. Definitive assertions are well supported. It reflects content from the course materials. There is clear evidence that all
class preparation material (reading, video, audio) was completed.
Critical Thinking. The Paper demonstrates a thorough understanding of what critical thinking is. Critical thinking is applied thoroughly in
analysis of the material to decide if a claim is always true, sometimes true, partly true or false. It is used to create insightful claims based
on reason and evidence.
Writing. The Paper demonstrates quality college-level writing and is well structured. Observations are descriptive and to the point. The
Paper is free of grammar, spelling and other errors.
Format. The Paper is consistent with the required formatting and the example Paper provided. The Paper meets the requirement for
length.
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Requirements for Papers & Scoring Criteria, v1, Page 4 of 7
MGT 166: BUSINESS ETHICS AND
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SCORING RUBRIC
Content (3 pts possible)
3 – Excellent, thoughtful work; includes introspective thought, exploration of themes and /or connections with previous knowledge and
experiences; definitive assertions are well supported; demonstrates comprehension of course content; clear evidence that all materials
were completed and considered thoroughly; meets all the requirements of the Paper
2 – Good but falls short of one to several criteria for full credit or has at least one significant problem; may have less evidence that readings
were completed and considered
1 – Satisfactory; falls short of several criteria and/or has some significant problems; may have less evidence that readings were completed and
considered
0 – Poor effort or incomplete, e.g., wrong material(s) discussed
Critical Thinking (2 pts possible)
2 – Demonstrates critical thinking with diligent reflection, sound analysis and conclusions. It includes at least one insightful claim based on
reason and evidence
1 – Good effort but falls short of one to several criteria for full credit
0 – Little or no evidence of critical thinking
Writing (2 pts possible)
2 – Writing is quality college-level work; material is well structured; grammar is excellent; observations are descriptive and to the point; the
work has been carefully edited and proofread and contains no errors
1 – Writing is average with errors, poor structure, grammar mistakes, inattention to detail, and/or weak effort
0 – Writing is poor, not at college-level, with little or no evidence of editing and proofreading
Format (1 pt possible)
1 – Meets all formatting requirements
0 – Does not meet all formatting requirements
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Requirements for Papers & Scoring Criteria, v1, Page 5 of 7
MGT 166: BUSINESS ETHICS AND
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KEY TO SCORING NOTES
C - Content
Does not meet requirements of
the Paper
Meets some but not all
requirements of the Paper
Lack of evidence that all materials
were completed and considered
Statement(s) of fact(s) without
attribution when needed
CT – Critical Thinking
Lack of evidence of critical
thinking and analysis
Insufficient critical thinking and
analysis
Critique of the material rather
than critical thinking or analysis
No insightful claims
5
One or more arguments are
unsupported
Insightful claim lacks supporting
reason or evidence
6
Superficial discussion
7
8
Summarizes material
Restates material
9
Wrong material(s) covered
Does not address any
implications or consequences
No /Lack of synthesis of ideas
Observational rather than
analytical
Fails to introduce an idea that
wasn’t already presented in the
material
1
2
3
4
10 Contradictions within the
submission
W - Writing
Convoluted writing*
F - Format
Too short
Spelling error(s)
Too long
Word(s) used incorrectly
Incorrect line spacing
Incorrect/inappropriate slang,
colloquialism; failure to explain
usage.
Insufficient proofreading and
editing
Incorrect margins
Grammar issue(s)
Punctuation error(s)
Lacks structured paragraphs
Poor readability, e.g.,
problem with text color, lack
of paragraph indentation
Information missing from or
not put in upper left corner
Does not include word count
Incorrect font size
Content requires more
paragraphs, has run on
sentence(s) or has other
structural problem(s)
No conclusion (Doesn’t leave the
reader with an overall point/main
idea)
11 False statements made
*Convoluted writing may include:
Failure to make points clearly, using well-constructed sentences written with a consistent grammar style and building a coherent
argument structure systematically.
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Requirements for Papers & Scoring Criteria, v1, Page 6 of 7
MGT 166: BUSINESS ETHICS AND
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Sentence structure characterized by excessive detail, needless repetition, and outlandish figures of speech; unnecessarily intricate or
complicated.
Sentences contain unnecessary words; paragraphs contain unnecessary sentences.
Long, wordy sentences which are sometimes difficult to follow due to their excessive detail or lack of punctuation.
Wanders all over the place before getting to the point.
Hard to understand. Many ideas mixed in together. Confusing to the reader.
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Requirements for Papers & Scoring Criteria, v1, Page 7 of 7
paper3
by Qianli Xu
Submission date: 05-Feb-2019 01:47AM (UT C-0800)
Submission ID: 1073311721
File name: paper3.docx (12.61K)
Word count: 463
Character count: 2338
P3
1
CT 1
F4
W6
CIRC
W7
2
CT 5
W1
W5
C8
W5
4
W7
paper3
GRADEMARK REPORT
FINAL GRADE
GENERAL COMMENTS
3
Instructor
/8
PAGE 1
QM
P3
Recall that the title of your speech is "Driving Economic Growth with a Circular Economy." T he
main f ocus of your paper should have been on how a circular economy will improve the
country's economy through increased jobs and prof it. T his argument is not evident in your
paper.
Comment 1
Content:2
Critical T hinking:0
Writing:1
Format:0
QM
CT1
Lack of evidence of critical thinking and analysis
Additional Comment
Your f irst paragraph discusses how a circular economy will provide economic growth however
there is no support f or this argument in the rest of your paper.
QM
F4
Incorrect margins
QM
W6
Grammar issue(s)
Additional Comment
would
QM
CIRC
the circular economy
QM
W7
Punctuation error(s)
Additional Comment
using, and
Comment 2
emissions
QM
CT5
Insightf ul claims lack supporting reason or evidence
Additional Comment
What is meant by this statement? T his is a good call to action and an opportunity to tell the
economists and the politicians in the audience how they can do their part to create a circular
economy.
QM
W1
Convoluted writing
Additional Comment
Not sure what is meant by this statement.
QM
W5
Insuf f icient proof reading and editing
Additional Comment
I will not lie that I had
QM
C8
Restates material
Additional Comment
Your f irst three paragraphs discuss what a circular economy is in dif f erent ways. Focus on how
it creates economic value.
QM
W5
Insuf f icient proof reading and editing
Strikethrough.
Comment 4
a skills revolution
QM
W7
Punctuation error(s)
Additional Comment
country's
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