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Week 14 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 14 — Is the Fair Plan as Sure as It Sounds? A Bias Check on a Club Memo — 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Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI.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 13 of the term — audit a planning memo for confirmation bias, anchoring, overconfidence, and availability, state the strongest objection fairly in standard form, and explain to someone new why a confident plan still needs checking.

This week you learned to catch confirmation bias with a disconfirming test, to run an evidence audit on a search, to spot motivated reasoning and overconfidence, to name the availability heuristic and anchoring, and to use four debiasing habits. In this assignment you work four short problems on one illustrative club memo, interpret each one, state the strongest objection fairly in standard form as Week 2 taught you, and explain to someone who has never studied critical thinking why a confident plan still needs checking. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Argument Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your text is an illustrative memo from a student club's events lead, with no real club, school, vendor, or person behind it. The club's own setup log is printed after the memo.

"We should hold the spring fair outdoors on the quad. I searched 'benefits of outdoor events', 'why outdoor fairs draw crowds', 'outdoor fair success stories', and 'best outdoor fair ideas', and 12 of the 15 sources I found favor outdoor events. The tent vendor's price was 900 dollars and is now 720, so the tents are a bargain we can't pass up. Setup will take 2 hours; I'm certain of it. One member objects that our fair was rained out once and says we should never risk the weather again, but that's one story."

The club's setup log (illustrative): the last 4 outdoor setups took 5, 7, 8, and 4 hours. A second search, run with phrases about the drawbacks of outdoor fairs, is described in Problem 4.

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

  1. Of the 15 sources the events lead found, 12 favor outdoor events. What percentage of the sources found favor outdoor events?
  2. The tent price was 900 dollars and is now 720 dollars. By what percent of the old price has the price dropped?
  3. The club's last 4 outdoor setups took 5, 7, 8, and 4 hours. What is the average setup time, in hours?
  4. Of the first 15 sources, 3 favor holding the fair indoors. A second search finds 12 more sources; 4 of them favor outdoor events and the rest favor indoors. How many of all the sources favor indoors?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

  • Problem 1: run an evidence audit on the memo's search, name the bias it shows, and say what the percentage can and cannot show when every search phrase asked for one side.
  • Problem 2: name the anchor and the shortcut it triggers, and say what question the discount leaves open and how you would answer it.
  • Problem 3: name the bias in "Setup will take 2 hours; I'm certain of it," compare the plan with the log, and name the debiasing habit that would have caught it.
  • Problem 4: consider the opposite by writing the member's strongest objection in standard form, under the principle of charity, and saying where it goes on the map; say what the shortcut is in the member's own "rained out once" reason and what number would test it; say what the indoor count from both searches does and does not show; 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 memo and asks, "Most of the sources agree, the tents are on sale, and the lead is certain about setup, so outdoors is the smart call, right?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains in everyday words why the memo's confidence has not yet been earned, reports the percentage of sources that favor outdoor events and how those sources were found, and names one limit: the search asked for only one side, or the setup plan ignores the club's own record. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a phone-plan ad that says "Was 60 dollars a month, now 45 — our happiest customers say it's the best deal around." Model answer: "The 60 dollars is a starting number the company picked, so the 45 can feel cheap whether or not it is. The happy customers are ones the company chose to quote. Before switching, compare the plan with what other carriers charge for the same data. Until then, treat the ad as a claim to check, not as a bargain."

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

Show your arithmetic, write each bias and habit out by its course name, write the objection in standard form, and quote the sentences you use. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report, and find every quoted sentence in the memo or the setup log, 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 memo's confidence has not been earned, reporting the percentage of sources that favor outdoor events and how those sources were found, and naming one limit; and
  • a one-line restatement of the values you used (the sources found and how many favor outdoor events, the old and new tent prices, the four logged setup times, and the counts from the two searches), 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 of the argument map with the objection drawn as an arrow marked "against", 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 memo and the setup log 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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