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Inside Chipotle’s
Contamination Crisis
Smugness and happy talk about sustainability aren’t
working anymore.
By Susan Berfield | December 22, 2015
Photographs by Ted Cavanaugh
From
(http://www.bloomberg.com/businessweek)
Chris Collins is a 32-year-old Web developer and photographer who
lives in Oregon, just outside Portland. He and his wife are conscientious
about their food: They eat organic, local produce and ethically raised
animals. Collins liked to have a meal at Chipotle once a week. On Friday
evening, Oct. 23, he ordered his regular chicken bowl at his usual
Chipotle in Lake Oswego. His dinner was made of 21 ingredients,
including toasted cumin, sautéed garlic, fresh organic cilantro, finely
diced tomatoes, two kinds of onion, romaine lettuce, and kosher salt. It
tasted as good as always.
By the
next night, Collins’s body(http://bloomberg.com/)
was aching and his stomach was upset.
(http://bloomberg.com/)
Then he began experiencing cramping and diarrhea. His stomach
bloated. “Moving gave me excruciating pain,” he says, “and anytime I
ate or drank it got worse.” His diarrhea turned bloody. “All I was doing
was pooping blood. It was incredibly scary.” After five days, he went to
an urgent-care clinic near his home; the nurse sent him to an
emergency room. He feared he might have colon cancer.
On Halloween, the ER doctor called him at home: Collins had Shigatoxin-producing E. coli 026, and he’d likely gotten it from one of those
21 ingredients in his meal at Chipotle. (This was later confirmed by
public-health officials.) The doctor warned him that kidney failure was
possible; intensive treatment, including dialysis, could be necessary.
His kidneys held up, but it took an additional five days for the worst of
Collins’s symptoms to ease and nearly six weeks for him to recover. He
still doesn’t have as much physical strength as he used to, and he feels
emotionally shaky, too. “Before, I was doing the P90X workouts. For a
long time after, I couldn’t even walk a few blocks,” he says. “It made me
feel old and weak and anxious.” On Nov. 6, Collins sued Chipotle,
seeking unspecified damages.
Collins was among 53 people in
nine states who were sickened
with the same strain of E. coli;
46 had eaten at Chipotle in the
week before they fell ill. Twenty
got sick enough to be
hospitalized, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. “I trusted they were
providing me with ‘food with
integrity,’ ” Collins says,
sarcastically repeating the
company motto. “We fell for
their branding.” Chipotle’s
public stance during the
outbreak irritated him, too. The
company closed all 43 of its
restaurants in Oregon and
Washington in early November
to try to identify the source of
the E. coli and sanitize the
spaces. Notices on restaurant
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. ,
. Subscribe now
(https://subscribe.businessweek.com/servlet/OrdersGateway?
cds_mag_code=BWK&cds_page_id=
).
doors generally referred to
problems with the supply chain
or equipment. But local media
reported that at least one restaurant in Portland put up a note that said,
“Don’t
panic … order should be restored
to the universe in the very near
(http://bloomberg.com/)
(http://bloomberg.com/)
future.” “That felt so snarky,” Collins says. “People could die from this,
and they were so smug.”
For a long time, smug worked pretty well for Chipotle Mexican Grill. It’s
grown into a chain of more than 1,900 locations
(http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-chipotle-oral-history/),
thanks in part to marketing—including short animated films about the
evils of industrial agriculture—that reminds customers that its fresh
ingredients and naturally raised meat are better than rivals’ and better
for the world. The implication: If you eat Chipotle, you’re doing the
right thing, and maybe you’re better, too. It helped the company,
charging about $7 for a burrito, reach a market valuation of nearly
$24 billion. Its executives seemed to have done the impossible and
made a national fast-food chain feel healthy.
Fewer people associate Chipotle with “healthy” now. Three months
before Collins was infected with E. coli, five people fell ill eating at a
Seattle-area restaurant. By the time local health officials had confirmed
a link, the outbreak was over, so no one said anything. In August,
234 customers and employees contracted norovirus at a Chipotle in
Simi Valley, Calif., where another worker was infected. Salmonellatainted tomatoes at 22 outlets in Minnesota sickened 64 people in
August and September; nine had to be hospitalized. Norovirus struck
again in late November: More than 140 Boston College students picked
up the highly contagious virus from a nearby Chipotle, including half of
the men’s basketball team. An additional 16 students and three healthcare staff picked it up from the victims. The source? A sick worker who
wasn’t sent home although Chipotle began offering paid sick leave in
June. In the second week of December, when Chipotle should have been
on highest alert, a Seattle restaurant had to be briefly shut down after a
health inspection found that cooked meat on the takeout line wasn’t
being kept at a high enough temperature. And in the most recent case,
on Dec. 21, the CDC announced it was investigating an outbreak of what
seems to be a different and rare version of E. coli 026 that’s sickened
five people in two states who ate at Chipotle in mid-November. The
company says it had expected to see additional cases. It still doesn’t
know which ingredients
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-20/chipotle-e-colioutbreak-probe-expands-to-california-new-york) made people ill.
Almost 500 people around the country
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-04/chipotle-saysmore-cases-may-be-reported-in-e-coli-outbreak) have become sick
from Chipotle food since July, according to public-health officials. And
those are just the ones who went to a doctor, gave a stool sample, and
were(http://bloomberg.com/)
properly diagnosed. Food-safety
experts say they believe with any
(http://bloomberg.com/)
outbreak the total number of people affected is at least 10 times the
reported number. The CDC estimates that 48 million Americans get sick
from contaminated food every year.
At Chipotle, three different pathogens caused
the five known outbreaks. That wasn’t
inevitable or coincidental. “There’s a problem
within the company,” says Michael Doyle, the
director of the center for food safety at the
University of Georgia. Chipotle has gotten big
selling food that’s unprocessed, free of
antibiotics and GMOs, sometimes organic,
sometimes local. “Blah, blah, blah,” says Doug
Powell, a retired food-safety professor and the
publisher of bar log.com. “They were paying
attention to all that stuff, but they weren’t
paying attention to microbial safety.” Whatever
its provenance, if food is contaminated it can
still make us sick—or even kill. Millennials may
discriminate when they eat, but bacteria are
agnostic.
“Food with integrity,” a promise to Chipotle’s customers and a rebuke to
its competitors, has become the source of much schadenfreude among
both. Chipotle’s stock has lost about 30 percent of its value since
August. Sales at established stores dropped 16 percent in November,
and executives expect a decline of 8 percent to 11 percent in
comparable-store sales for the last three months of the year. That would
be the first quarterly decline for Chipotle as a public company.
Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder and co-chief executive, went on the Today
show on Dec. 10, apologized to everyone who’d fallen ill, and announced
a comprehensive food-safety program that he said would far exceed
industry norms. He didn’t address why a company that had challenged
quality standards with such gusto hadn’t taken on safety standards as
well. Chipotle has said it will shift more food preparation out of
restaurants and into centralized kitchens—that is, it will do things more
like the fast-food chains it’s long mocked. Ells’s company has always
urged customers to think about its supply chain
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-08/chipotle-sgreatest-strength-is-now-its-greatest-weakness-too). Well, now they are.
(http://bloomberg.com/) (http://bloomberg.com/)
Six weeks after the first E. coli
victims in the Pacific Northwest
got sick and about a week after
Ells’s Today appearance,
Chipotle placed a full-page ad,
signed by him, in newspapers
across the country. “The fact
that anyone has become ill
eating at Chipotle is completely
unacceptable to me, and I am
deeply sorry,” he wrote. “As a
result, we are committed to
becoming known as the leader in
food safety, just as we are known
for using the very best
ingredients in a fast-food
setting.” Ells was in Seattle by
then. During interviews he
carefully followed the new
standard thinking on corporate
crisis management:
Overapologize and then pivot to
the cheery future.
On Dec. 17, speaking by phone in New York, he’s still on message,
describing the Seattle restaurants he visited as clean and organized. “I
ate delicious food there,” he says. “Traffic was slow, but we’re ready for
people to come back. There is no E. coli in Chipotle. ” To hear Ells tell it,
the company is witnessing an outbreak of excitement. He says the
chain’s suppliers are excited to participate in the new safety programs;
employees at headquarters in Denver are excited to contribute however
they can; it’s “a very, very exciting time for us to be pushing the
boundaries” on food safety. “We’re embracing this as an opportunity.”
Ells studied art history in college, trained as a chef at the Culinary
Institute of America, and opened the first Chipotle in Denver in 1993
with a loan from his father. He set up a model—open kitchen, fresh
ingredients, real cooking in the back, and an assembly line in front,
allowing customization and speed—that’s become its own industry
standard. Chipotle grew from 489 restaurants and revenue of
$628 million in 2006, when it went public, to about 1,800 restaurants
and $4.1 billion in revenue in 2014. Net profit increased 60 percent from
2012 to 2014. Ells and his co-CEO, Montgomery Moran, together earned
more
than $140 million in total compensation
during that time. And
(http://bloomberg.com/)
(http://bloomberg.com/)
Michael Pollan, the good-food arbiter, said that Chipotle was his
favorite fast-food chain and that he didn’t have a second.
The company was influenced in ways it doesn’t always admit by the
biggest, most industrialized chain of them all: McDonald’s. The
company invested about $340 million in Chipotle from 1998, when it
had 13 restaurants in Colorado, until 2006, when the two parted ways.
McDonald’s taught Chipotle supply-chain economics. Chipotle often
derides fast-food chains and their factory farms, enlisting the likes of
Willie Nelson to make plaintive music videos about crop chemicals and
steroidal cattle. But Ells respects McDonald’s size. In an interview with
Bloomberg in 2014, he said Chipotle could one day be “bigger than
McDonald’s in the U.S. I mean, that’s not an unreasonable way to think
about this.”
The companies shared distribution centers and processing facilities,
and in some cases they still do. Chipotle calls these facilities
commissaries. They’ll play an increasingly important role as more food
prep is shifted to these centralized kitchens. When I ask who else uses
them, Ells, leery of invoking the competition, says: “I don’t know if I
know their other customers. I can see what you could make of this. It’s
nothing.”
Chipotle, like any chain its size, has infrastructure it doesn’t always
want to fully reveal. McDonald’s has a System. Chipotle does, too. It has
about 100 suppliers for its 64 ingredients. That doesn’t include local
farms—those within 350 miles of a restaurant—which at peak season
supply only 10 percent of its produce.
Executives will identify a few suppliers: Chipotle has for 15 years bought
pork for its carnitas from Niman Ranch, where pigs are raised outdoors
or in pens that are “deeply bedded.” The company website features Tom
Kearns, a Wisconsin dairy farmer, as a symbol of its support for family
farms. But most suppliers go unnamed. Why? “This is not something we
generally provide,” Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold said in an e-mail.
Nor does Chipotle generally provide the names of its distributors or
commissaries. But it will confirm them if asked. Chipotle’s pork and
beef are braised at OSI Group and Ed Miniat Inc., outside Chicago;
Ready Foods in Denver cooks its beans and makes its red and green
salsas. The companies don’t talk about their other clients, but on its
website, OSI calls itself “a global leader in supplying value-added
protein items” and other foods to large brands. John Knight, a
restaurant consultant who worked with Chipotle from 2009 to 2011,
describes these commissaries as high-end. “Chipotle uses the ones that
do food
for cruise ships and casinos,”
he says. “They’re not making
(http://bloomberg.com/)
(http://bloomberg.com/)
hospital, school, or jail food.” Ells, ever wary of protecting Chipotle’s
image, notes that he taught the chefs in these commissaries to cook
food the way he would.
The source, or sources, of E. coli were somewhere in that supply chain.
Because restaurants from Oregon to New York served contaminated
food, the problem most likely originated with one of Chipotle’s big
suppliers (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-1202/chipotle-sets-stricter-supply-standards-amid-e-coli-outbreak), not
one of the local farms. E. coli is spread through human and animal
feces. The harmful microbes can be transmitted to crops in irrigation
water, or if animals are allowed to defecate in the fields, or if manure
isn’t properly treated. Cooking food long enough at high enough
temperatures or properly sanitizing it kills E. coli. Hard-to-clean
produce that’s eaten raw is considered high-risk. At Chipotle that’s the
tomatoes, lettuce, and cilantro—in other words, the same stuff that
gives Chipotle its fresh-tasting advantage.
The CDC says Chipotle has been very cooperative in the E. coli
investigation, but that the company is having trouble telling the agency
which batches of ingredients went to which stores at which times. “The
system they have is not able to solve the problem we have at hand. It’s
not granular enough,” says Ian Williams, chief of the CDC’s outbreak
response and prevention branch. He notes that “traceability from the
farm to the point of service” should be improved throughout the food
industry. In recent years, the agency has been able to find the
contaminated ingredients in fewer than half of all multistate outbreaks.
Without a conclusion to the investigation, some customers’ unease
about returning to Chipotle could be prolonged. Ells prefers to see the
uncertainty as another opportunity. “The silver lining is that it has
forced
us—not forced us, caused(http://bloomberg.com/)
us—to take a rigorous look at every
(http://bloomberg.com/)
ingredient.” Couldn’t Chipotle have done that anyway? “Yes, that’s
true.”
The spread of norovirus in Simi Valley and Boston was caused by
breaches of protocol, Ells says. Those protocols were established at
Chipotle in 2008 after a norovirus outbreak sickened 500 people near
Kent State University, in Ohio. Norovirus, which is highly contagious, is
the leading cause of illness from contaminated foods, affecting as many
as 21 million people in the U.S. every year. Its symptoms, including
diarrhea, vomiting, and stomach pain, usually last a couple of days. It’s
a problem on cruise ships and in other enclosed places; in Britain it’s
known as the winter vomiting bug. The Boston College outbreak
occurred as students were preparing for finals. Health services helped
care for the sick students, and the dining hall staff prepared special
meal packs for them. The facilities crews disinfected every common
area on campus.
In late October, Chipotle hired Mansour Samadpour
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-03/chipotle-hiresfood-safety-consultants-to-cope-with-health-scare), head of IEH
Laboratories & Consulting Group in Seattle, to put together a more
aggressive food-safety plan, which they hope will bring the risk of
contamination to near zero. Samadpour describes his lab as a privately
financed public-health organization. “Being in compliance with
industry standards is less than 5 percent of what companies need to do
to make food safe,” he says. “Company after company finds that out
after they have events.”
(http://bloomberg.com/) (http://bloomberg.com/)
Samadpour recommended changes at every step of Chipotle’s system.
More food will be prepared ahead of time, out of sight at commissaries,
and transported to 19 distribution centers and then to more than
1,900 restaurants. Samadpour calls it an “industrial-strength plan,” a
term Ells and other executives use, too. This won’t turn Chipotle into
McDonald’s, but it could make for some awkward marketing. “They’re
sort of in a bind,” says Christopher Muller, a professor of hospitality at
Boston University. “They want to have this local, fresh image, and
making food in a commissary and shipping it all over the country takes
away from that.”
Before it’s harvested, produce will be screened for pathogens in small
batches using what Chipotle calls high-resolution DNA-based tests.
Meeting these higher standards will be expensive for smaller farms:
There’s the cost of the testing itself and of discarding rejected
vegetables and herbs. “Will everybody be able to afford it right away?
No,” Ells says. “Will we help? We will. Is it going to work everywhere?
Maybe not.” Chipotle’s chief financial officer, Jack Hartung, is more
direct. “We like the local program, we think it’s important, but with
what’s just happened we have to make sure food safety is absolutely our
highest priority,” he says. “If it’s testing and safety vs. taking a step
backward on local, we would do that and hope it would be temporary.”
If produce
passes the initial tests,
it will be sent to the commissaries,
(http://bloomberg.com/)
(http://bloomberg.com/)
where it will be washed, sanitized, and retested. The commissaries,
rather than the restaurants, will be responsible for cleaning and
packaging the cilantro, shredding the lettuce, and dicing the tomatoes.
A single Chipotle restaurant
uses about five cases of tomatoes
a day. Employees used to dice
the tomatoes by hand in the
restaurants. When that became
too demanding a task, Ells
introduced food processors, but
he wasn’t happy with the results.
He moved the dicing to a
centralized kitchen. He won’t
say where. Two years ago,
Chipotle bought food processors
that could dice tomatoes in its
kitchens just as well as the
commissaries could and better
retain their flavor. But now, postE. coli, the tomatoes will again
arrive at the restaurants diced,
packaged, and tested for
pathogens. “If you ate the
tomato on its own, could you tell
the difference? Maybe,” Ells says. “But I challenge you to tell the
difference in a burrito.” Ells says the tomatoes themselves will be the
same, but the cuts will be cleaner and more consistent. Still, he says, “it
is my desire that one day we can do it in-house again. There’s no
method of testing that makes that possible now.”
Commissaries have been preparing a portion of Chipotle’s meat from
the early days. It was never practical or efficient to braise meat in
Chipotle’s small kitchens. The barbacoa and carnitas are vacuumpacked and cooked sous vide, in a temperature-regulated bath. Then
they’re sent to regional distribution centers and on to the restaurants.
Steak and chicken arrive raw in the restaurants and are marinated in an
adobe rub, then grilled. The new protocols require changes to how the
meat is marinated to prevent cross-contamination.
In the restaurants, workers will add cilantro to higher-temperature rice.
“That’s a kill step,” Samadpour says. They’ll blanch avocados, onions,
jalapeños, lemons, and limes for 5 to 10 seconds in boiling water. That
will (http://bloomberg.com/)
destroy any microbes on the(http://bloomberg.com/)
surface. Lemon and lime juice will be
added earlier to the salsa and guacamole to reduce the microbe count.
“And guess what?” Ells asks. “It turns the salsa a brighter red and gives a
sweeter taste.” Any suggestion that these tweaks might together cause a
noticeable change in taste for the worse is dismissed. “It’s the genius of
‘and,’ ” Ells says. “We’re doing both: great ingredients and the safest
place.” Hartung, the CFO, has his own way of conveying that idea: “We
want to have our cake and eat it, too.”
The Chipotle assembly line is a marvel of
efficiency, and Ells often speaks of it in a
way that would make a McDonald’s
executive proud. “We all think about the
Chipotle line. ... How do you do it faster?”
he said in his 2014 interview with
Bloomberg. “Throughput is something that
we always will have to think about. Faster,
faster, faster, faster.” Throughput is the
unappetizing way fast-food restaurants talk
about serving their customers when their
customers aren’t listening. On the most
efficient Chipotle lines, customers get their
food in less than two minutes, says Knight,
the restaurant consultant. Most other fast-casual chains take from four
to six minutes. Arnold, Chipotle’s spokesman, says fast locations
“process more than 300 transactions per hour during peak hours.”
An alarm goes off every hour in every Chipotle restaurant, to remind
workers to wash their hands and put on new latex gloves. But three
former managers, who asked to remain anonymous to speak openly
about their former employer, said the alarm was often ignored when the
restaurants were busy. Field managers came by every month or so, and
for a few days afterward employees observed the hand-washing rule,
says a former manager, who worked in a restaurant outside San
Francisco. Then they’d slack off again. He also notes that Chipotle put
more emphasis on the safe handling of meat than produce. Another
former manager, from Arizona, says Chipotle assumed the speed and
skill of seasoned culinary workers, while her restaurant was staffed
mostly by young employees on their first job. Arnold says new
employees aren’t expected to work as efficiently as more experienced
ones.
Chipotle
opened 192 restaurants(http://bloomberg.com/)
in 2014 and expected to open 215 to 225
(http://bloomberg.com/)
in 2015. The company held its first National Career Day on Sept. 9. The
goal was to hire 4,000 employees, increasing its staff by 7 percent. That
sounds like a public-relations coup and a human resources nightmare.
Were some of Chipotle’s safety problems a result of growing too fast?
“I can understand linking the two, but I don’t think the growth rate is
the cause of the problem,” Hartung says. “The standard procedures
worked for a long time. We hadn’t had outbreaks since 2009. We’re not
going back and saying let’s train them to do better. We’re training them
to do something different.”
No one at Chipotle has publicly estimated the cost of the safety
programs it’s putting in place. “Very, very expensive,” is as close as Ells
comes. “Right now we’re not trying to make this cost-effective. We’re
just doing it,” Hartung says. “We’re likely to do it very inefficiently.”
When asked at an investor conference if he’d consider raising prices or
decreasing portions to cover some of the expense, he said: “That would
be tacky.” He did note, though, that eventually Chipotle might raise
prices, and “instead of investing that in food integrity, we might have to
invest that in food safety.” In the meantime, he says profits and the
profit margin will be messy. The company is also facing at least seven
lawsuits, the most recent filed by a mother whose son was infected with
norovirus in Boston (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-1209/chipotle-will-keep-boston-location-closed-while-it-tests-workers).
He’s still recovering. Chipotle says it doesn’t comment on pending legal
actions, but in incidents such as these its aim is to make things right
with customers.
Chipotle isn’t giving any estimates for 2016 at all, except to say that 220
to 235 restaurant openings will proceed. When I ask Ells if they’ve
considered scaling back, he says: “Not at all. It never entered our
minds.”
Chipotle was already experiencing slower growth in established stores.
Comparable-store sales rose 16.8 percent in 2014; during the first nine
months of 2015, that figure was 5.5 percent. Hartung says there have
been surges and slowdowns before. “Nothing signaled to us that we
were(http://bloomberg.com/)
at a peak,” he says. “We were
just taking a pause.” Yet it’s natural
(http://bloomberg.com/)
for a company that’s been around for two decades to shift to more
modest growth.
It’s worth noting that, contaminated food aside, Chipotle is on the right
side of fresh food trends, while its more old-school rivals stumble. But
the company’s pause could be extended. Mark Crumpacker, the chief
creative and development officer, says Chipotle has seen a drop-off
(http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2015-12-08/chipotle-e-colioutbreak-is-a-major-pr-problem) among its least frequent customers
and its most frequent. “That’s more worrying,” he says. Chipotle may
have lost some customers altogether. “A small percentage may never
come back, or it may take years.”
Confidence has taken the company far. It may have gotten Chipotle into
this mess; it may help get it out. Crumpacker says he has plans for
advertising next year on radio, in print, online, and through direct mail.
“It won’t be, ‘Come to the safest place to eat,’ ” he says. “Hopefully, it will
be humorous to the extent that’s appropriate.” But he knows how great
the challenge is. “There’s nothing worse from a trust perspective. This is
not the kind of problem that you market your way out of.”
—With Craig Giammona and Leslie Patton
Editor: Nick Summers
Producer: Laura Ratliff
Food Styling: Brett Kurzweil
Internal Processes
2
1
Less than
Unsatisfactory
Satisfactory
0.00%
74.00%
70.0 %Content
40.0 %Chipotle Chipotle
Flowcharts and flowcharts are
Commentary
absent,
inappropriate,
or irrelevant.
30.0
%Restaurant
Flowchart and
Commentary
Restaurant
flowchart and
commentary
are absent,
inappropriate,
or irrelevant.
3
Satisfactory
79.00%
Chipotle
flowcharts
make weak
connections
with several
gaps, and they
are weak or
marginal with
gaps in
presentation.
Chipotle
flowcharts
make
connections at
a cursory level
and contain
minimal gaps.
Supporting
sources show
some
understanding
of the content.
Restaurant
flowchart and
commentary
make weak
connections
with several
gaps, and they
are weak or
marginal with
gaps in
presentation.
Restaurant
flowchart and
commentary
make
connections at
a cursory level
and contain
minimal gaps.
Supporting
sources show
some
understanding
of the content.
20.0
%Organization
and Effectiveness
7.0 %Thesis
Paper lacks
Thesis is
Thesis is
Development and any discernible insufficiently apparent and
Purpose
overall purpose developed or appropriate to
purpose.
4
Good
87.00%
5
Excellent
100.00%
Chipotle
Chipotle
flowcharts
flowcharts
make
make
meaningful meaningful
connections, connections,
contain no
contain no
gaps, and are gaps, and are
clear and
thorough and
integrated.
well
Supporting integrated.
sources
Supporting
illustrate an sources
understanding illustrate a
of the content. deep
understanding
of the content.
Restaurant
Restaurant
flowchart and flowchart and
commentary commentary
make
make
meaningful meaningful
connections, connections,
contain no
contain no
gaps, and are gaps, and are
clear and
thorough and
integrated.
well
Supporting integrated.
sources
Supporting
illustrate an sources
understanding illustrate a
of the content. deep
understanding
of the content.
Thesis is clear Thesis is
and forecasts comprehensive
the
and contains
development the essence of
or organizing vague. Purpose
claim.
is not clear.
20.0
%Organization
and Effectiveness
8.0 %Argument Statement of Sufficient
Logic and
purpose is not justification of
Construction
justified by the claims is
conclusion.
lacking.
The conclusion Argument
does not
lacks
support the
consistent
claim made. unity. There
Argument is are obvious
incoherent and flaws in the
uses
logic. Some
noncredible
sources have
sources.
questionable
credibility.
of the paper. the paper.
Thesis is
Thesis
descriptive statement
and reflective makes the
of the
purpose of the
arguments
paper clear.
and
appropriate to
the purpose.
Argument is Argument
Clear and
orderly, but
shows logical convincing
may have a few progressions. argument that
inconsistencies. Techniques of presents a
The argument argumentation persuasive
presents
are evident. claim in a
minimal
There is a
distinctive and
justification of smooth
compelling
claims.
progression of manner. All
Argument
claims from sources are
logically, but introduction authoritative.
not thoroughly, to conclusion.
supports the
Most sources
purpose.
are
Sources used authoritative.
are credible.
Introduction
and conclusion
bracket the
thesis.
20.0
%Organization
and Effectiveness
5.0 %Mechanics Surface errors Frequent and Some
Prose is
Writer is
of Writing
are pervasive repetitive
mechanical
largely free of clearly in
(includes
enough that
mechanical
errors or typos mechanical command of
spelling,
they impede errors distract are present, but errors,
standard,
punctuation,
communication the reader.
they are not
although a
written,
grammar,
of meaning.
Inconsistencies overly
few may be academic
language use)
Inappropriate in language
distracting to present. The English.
word choice or choice
the reader.
writer uses a
sentence
(register) or Correct and
variety of
construction is word choice varied sentence effective
used.
are present.
structure and sentence
Sentence
structure is
correct but not
varied.
audienceappropriate
language are
employed.
structures and
figures of
speech.
10.0
%Documentation
10.0
Sources are not Documentation Sources are
Sources are Sources are
%Documentation documented. of sources is documented, as documented, completely
of Sources
inconsistent or appropriate to as appropriate and correctly
(citations,
incorrect, as assignment and to assignment documented,
footnotes,
appropriate to style, although and style, and as appropriate
references,
assignment
some
format is
to assignment
bibliography,
and style, with formatting
mostly
and style, and
etc., as
numerous
errors may be correct.
format is free
appropriate to
formatting
present.
of error.
assignment and
errors.
style)
100 %Total
Weightage
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