Explaining, fully explaining and justifying

One ladder, every question

• Business Studies does not grade you on how much you know. It grades you on how far you take one idea.
• All three external standards use the same three-step ladder, in the same words, printed at the top of every assessment schedule.
• The content changes between 90843, 90844 and 90845. The ladder never does.

Grade	What the marker calls it	What you have to do
Achieved	Explaining	State the what, then give the why
Merit	Fully explaining	Add how it affects a business or stakeholder goal
Excellence	Justifying	Judge it against an alternative, using evidence

Achieved — explaining

• Explaining means: give the what that answers the question asked, then expand by giving the reason(s) why it happens, or link ideas into a coherent rationale.
• The single most common Not Achieved answer is a what with no why — a definition, a label, a list.
• Structure your first two sentences like this:
  • What — "A flat structure has few levels of management and a wide span of control."
  • Why — "This means a decision made at the top reaches the shop floor after passing through only one or two people, so instructions are less likely to be distorted."

Merit — fully explaining

• Fully explaining means developing that explanation with how the situation or action could impact business or stakeholder goals, or lead to a particular outcome. It normally runs through effects, advantages, disadvantages or consequences.
• In practice: you must arrive at a business goal. Sales, profit, costs, market share, brand reputation, staff retention, survival.
• The Merit sentence is the third sentence, and it almost always contains the word so, which means or therefore.
  • "…so orders are dispatched the same day, which raises customer satisfaction and repeat purchases, increasing sales revenue."

Excellence — justifying

• Justifying means using relevant evidence to justify the significance of the decision or the likelihood of success.
• It must include reference to an alternative course of action, or new information that has not already been used earlier in the task.
• So an Excellence answer needs three things the Merit answer did not have:
  • a decision ("this is the better option")
  • a comparison ("compared with doing X instead…")
  • a reason the comparison matters ("because this business sells on premium quality, not price")
• The exam always signals it. Part (iii) of each question is worded "Justify, with TWO reasons, whether…" or "…which would be more successful", and it names the two criteria to judge against.

Turning one idea into all three grades

The same content, taken three steps up the ladder — the growth comes from depth, not from new facts.

Achieved. Kea Outdoor Ltd, an invented Christchurch outdoor clothing manufacturer, uses batch production. Batch production makes a group of identical items at a time before the machinery is changed over for the next group. This lets Kea Outdoor produce a run of one jacket size, then switch to another.

Merit. …Because a whole run is made at once, the machinery is set up once rather than for every garment, so the cost of production per jacket falls. Lower unit costs mean Kea Outdoor can either widen its profit margin or hold its retail price below imported jackets, which helps it meet its goal of growing market share in a competitive market.

Excellence. …Batch production is more appropriate for Kea Outdoor than flow production would be. Flow production has lower unit costs again, but it makes one identical product continuously, and Kea Outdoor's customers buy on fit and specialist features rather than price — a single continuous line could not produce eight sizes in three fabrics. Given that the business competes on product differentiation and not on being the cheapest, the flexibility of batch production is worth its higher unit cost, so it is the better choice for this business.