Explaining, fully explaining and evaluating

One ladder, every question

• Business Studies at this level is not about how much you know. It is about how far you take one idea.
• Every question is built on the same three-step ladder, whatever the topic.
• The content changes between quality, innovation and intellectual property. The ladder never does.

Step	What it is called	What you have to do
1	Explaining	State the what, then give the why
2	Fully explaining	Add how it affects a business or stakeholder goal
3	Evaluating	Weigh the options against each other and justify a decision, using new information

Step 1 on its own is a correct answer that stops halfway. The question is not finished until step 3.

Step 1 — explaining

• Explaining means: state what the answer to the question is, then expand by giving the reason(s) why it occurs, or link ideas into a coherent rationale.
• The commonest failed answer is a what with no why — a definition, a label, a list of features.
• Your first two sentences should look like this:
  • What — "Quality assurance builds the quality check into every stage of production rather than testing the finished item."
  • Why — "This means a fault is caught by the person who created it, at the point it happens, so the defective work is never passed on to the next stage."

Step 2 — fully explaining

• Fully explaining develops that explanation with how the situation or action could affect business or stakeholder goals, or a particular outcome. It runs through effects, advantages, disadvantages or consequences.
• In practice: you must arrive at a business goal. Profit, revenue, market share, unit cost, brand reputation, staff retention, sustainability.
• This is usually the third sentence, and it almost always contains so, which means or as a result.
  • "…so the amount of finished stock scrapped falls, which lowers the cost of waste and raises the profit margin on every unit sold."

Step 3 — evaluating

• Justifying one choice is not enough here. Evaluating is a bigger job.
• Evaluating means examining in detail by comparing and contrasting, or identifying relationships, to explain the impacts of the factors, responses or solutions — and then providing a justified recommendation or conclusion about their significance or likely success.
• A complete evaluation has four moving parts:
  • the explanation and the full explanation, still there underneath
  • a weighing up — the advantages set against the disadvantages, or this option set against the alternative
  • a decision or conclusion, stated plainly
  • new information that has not already been used earlier in the question — most often a long-term effect or a sustainability point
• The exam signals it every time. The last sub-part of a part is worded "How likely is it that…", "Provide a justified conclusion, including any new information, as to the likely success of…", or "Would you recommend…? Justify your recommendation, including any new information."

The same idea at all three depths

The content is identical. Only the depth changes.

Explained. Kea Ridge Merino, an invented Canterbury wool-garment exporter, uses total quality management. Total quality management makes every employee responsible for the quality of their own work, rather than leaving quality to an inspector at the end of the line. This means a knitting fault is spotted and corrected by the machinist who created it.

Fully explained. …Because faults are caught at the point they occur, Kea Ridge scraps far less finished stock, and finished stock is the most expensive thing to throw away because all the labour and materials have already been spent on it. Less waste lowers the cost of production per garment, which widens the margin on each export sale and supports Kea Ridge's goal of growing profit in a market where it cannot raise prices.

Evaluated. …Total quality management is the better system for Kea Ridge than quality control would be. Quality control is cheaper to set up, because it needs one inspector rather than training every machinist, and for a business making a low-value, high-volume product that would be the sensible choice. But Kea Ridge sells premium garments into European boutiques where a single faulty garment can lose a stockist permanently, so the cost of a defect reaching a customer is far higher than the cost of preventing it. Over the longer term, total quality management also builds a workforce that suggests improvements rather than waiting to be inspected, which continues to lower costs after the training investment has been paid back — an effect quality control can never produce.