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Week 12 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 12 — Should You Trust the Focus Gummy Post? Checking Sources in a Sales Page — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Critical Thinking Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 11 of the term — judge a sales page as a source on one claim, catch an endorsement from outside the field, trace a quotation back to its full sentence, check what a chatbot citation is worth, and explain to someone new why a confident post has not yet earned trust.

This week you learned to judge a source's credibility on one claim with four questions, to tell relevant expertise from authority outside the field, to trace a claim back to its primary source, to check what independent sources say about a page, to read a quotation against its full sentence, and to treat a citation as unverified until you find it. In this assignment you work four short problems on one illustrative sales page, interpret each one, keep the appeal to unqualified authority apart from good reliance on an expert as Week 7 taught you, and explain to someone who has never studied critical thinking why a confident page has not yet earned trust. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Argument Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your text is an illustrative sales page for a focus gummy, with no real product, company, singer, news site, researcher, or student behind it. The page belongs to the company that sells the gummies, and it links no study and no news story: "Study smarter with our focus gummies! In a survey of 120 of our customers, 84 said they studied longer. A famous pop singer says the gummies got her through exam season. A news site even quoted a sleep researcher saying 'caffeine can help focus' — and there is caffeine in every gummy. A study proves it works. And the full plan is cheap: 2 gummies a day for 28 days at 0.75 dollars a gummy."

The news site's full sentence, which the page shortened, reads (illustrative): "Caffeine can help focus for a few hours, but it can also disrupt sleep in the nights before an exam."

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic and quoting the sentences you use:

  1. Of the 120 customers surveyed, 84 said they studied longer. What percentage of the surveyed customers said they studied longer?
  2. The plan is 2 gummies a day for 28 days at 0.75 dollars a gummy. What does the full plan cost, in dollars?
  3. Of the 120 customers surveyed, how many did not say they studied longer?
  4. The news site's full sentence has 20 words, and the page quotes 4 of them. How many of the sentence's words did the page leave out?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: run the four credibility questions on the sales page as a source for the claim that the gummies help students study longer, name the questions it fails and why, and say what the survey's percentage can and cannot show when the seller chose whom to ask.
  • Problem 2: name the fallacy in the pop singer's endorsement, say what kind of source would have relevant expertise on whether a caffeine gummy helps studying, and say what tracing the plan's cost to its inputs does and does not settle.
  • Problem 3: explain what the customers who did not say they studied longer add to the picture, and label the chain from the sales page to the news site to the researcher's own words, saying which link is the primary source and where you would go to check it.
  • Problem 4: explain how cutting the sentence changes its meaning even though the quoted words are real, say how you would check a citation someone offered you for "a study proves it works", and then write the message to the friend described below.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend who has never studied logic reads the page and asks, "A famous singer loves them, most customers studied longer, and a researcher says caffeine helps focus, so they work, right?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains in everyday words why the page has not yet earned your trust on that claim, reports the percentage of surveyed customers who said they studied longer and who chose them, and names one limit: the seller picked whom to ask, and the researcher's full sentence also warns about sleep. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a car-wax ad that says "A champion race driver says our wax protects paint for a whole year, and most of our customers agree." Model answer: "A race driver knows driving, not paint chemistry, so that endorsement tells you little about the wax. The customers who agree are people who already bought it and were asked by the company that sells it. Before trusting the claim, look for a test run by someone with no stake in the sale. Until then, treat the ad as a claim to check, not as evidence."

Use that pattern for the friend, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic, write each credibility question and fallacy name out in full, and quote the sentences you use. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report, and find every quoted sentence in the sales page or the news site's sentence, without guessing which values, steps, or sentences you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

  • the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
  • your message to the friend, explaining why the page has not earned trust, reporting the percentage of surveyed customers who said they studied longer and who chose them, and naming one limit; and
  • a one-line restatement of the values you used (the customers surveyed and how many said they studied longer, the plan's inputs, and the sentence's word counts), so your answers are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch that traces the chain from the sales page to the news site to the researcher's own words, with a short note that says each verdict in words. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Quote the sales page and the news site's sentence only as they are printed here, word for word. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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