BUS454 Week 1 planning manual

1. Capture the live Week 1 packet

Create one row for every visible activity. Record its exact name, type, complete instructions, rubric or grading criteria, points and course weight, due date with time zone, permitted and required resources, length and file format, discussion reply rules, group or supervisor dependencies, attempt limits, submission location, and instructor announcements. Save the rubric version with the working file.

2. Translate criteria into visible proof

Rewrite each criterion as a testable question: what must the reader see to award this row? Pair it with the concept, evidence, example or calculation, reasoning step, and location where the proof will appear. This prevents a polished response from missing a small but expensive instruction. When the Week contains several activities, map each separately before deciding the order of work.

3. Apply the policy and ethical reasoning method

For BUS454 Ethical Decision Making for Business, the working focus is this: Identify the controlling rule or principle, distinguish facts from assumptions, compare affected stakeholders, and defend an action while acknowledging constraints and competing obligations.

Verify authority and dates, test the recommendation against a plausible counter-position, and separate legal requirements from ethical judgment.

Use course materials first when the live instructions require them. Add outside evidence only when permitted, verify every source directly, and keep notes that distinguish the source's claim from the student's interpretation. For calculations or structured analyses, retain inputs, units, assumptions, intermediate steps, and an independent check.

4. Build a student-owned response

Draft from the evidence map rather than from a generic sample. Open each section with its purpose, make the claim proportional to the evidence, explain the relationship the rubric asks for, and close with the decision, implication, or transition the reader needs. A tutor may demonstrate a parallel problem, question the logic, or comment on a student draft; the student's own judgment, context, language, verification, and final version must remain visible.

5. Run the Week 1 quality gate

Compare the finished work line by line with the live instructions and rubric. Check factual support, evidence currency, calculations, citations, headings, file type, accessibility, confidentiality, originality, and the stated audience. Confirm that replies, approvals, group actions, proctored steps, or supervised requirements have actually been completed by the student where the registered Week requires them.

6. Submit and close the loop

The student performs the final upload or entry, opens the submitted artifact to confirm it is readable, and saves the receipt. When a grade or feedback arrives, record the criterion-level result, instructor comment, required correction, and lesson for Week 2. If an attempt is missing, late, or technically broken, use Aspen's official channel immediately rather than assuming the gradebook will repair itself.

Worked reasoning: turning a Week 1 situation into a decision question

Orientation work in an ethics course fails most often at the first step, because the writer describes a situation and then jumps straight to a verdict. Build the bridge instead. Suppose a regional distributor learns that a long-standing supplier has offered its purchasing lead a paid trip to an industry conference. Before any framework applies, name four things: who actually holds the decision, what the realistic action set is, which facts are confirmed, and which are assumptions. The decision holder might be the purchasing lead, that person's manager, or a compliance officer, and the analysis changes with each. The action set might run from declining, to accepting with written disclosure, to attending with the company paying its own way. Confirmed facts might include the stated value of the trip and the current contract cycle; assumptions might include the supplier's motive and the lead's real influence over renewal.

Then locate the controlling rule before reaching for theory. A gift policy, a conflict of interest clause, and, wherever a government customer or a foreign official is involved, statutory anti-bribery rules will constrain the answer more sharply than any framework will. Only after the rule is named does normative reasoning add value, because the live question becomes whether the rule's boundary is also the ethical boundary. Write the result as one sentence naming the decision holder, the action under consideration, the obligation in tension, and the time frame. That sentence is the spine every later paragraph reports to. If the activity posted in your own classroom asks for something different, the posted version governs.

Reading the rubric row by row in the opening week

Open the posted criteria before the reading list, and read them as promises about what the grader will look for. Take one row at a time and write down four items: the action verb, the object of that verb, the points or share of the total the row carries, and the difference between the highest descriptor and the one just below it. That last item is where most recoverable credit sits, because the gap is usually a named behavior, such as supporting a claim with a cited source rather than asserting it, or addressing more than one affected group rather than one.

Watch for rows that are quietly compound. A single row asking you to identify an ethical issue and explain its significance to the organization is two obligations scored together, and a response that does the first well can still lose most of the row. Split compound rows onto separate lines in your own tracking sheet so nothing hides inside a comma.

Note which rows judge the argument and which judge the container: organization, headings, citation format, length. Container rows are the least expensive points in any week and the easiest to lose while concentrating on ideas. Record the version or date of the criteria next to your notes, because the rubric inside the registered classroom is the only authority and a rubric captured once can be revised.

What counts as a source in business ethics, and how one enters a draft

This subject draws on three source families, and mixing them without labels weakens a paper. The first is peer-reviewed scholarship: journals devoted to business ethics, to business and society, and to management theory, which supply frameworks, definitions, and empirical findings. The second is primary authority: statutes, regulations, agency guidance, enforcement documents, and formal standards. When a claim is legal, the instrument itself is the source, not somebody's summary of it. The third is organizational primary material: codes of conduct, governance charters, annual filings, and published policies. These are strong evidence of what an organization has committed to, but they come from an interested party, so present them as claims rather than as neutral findings.

Open a source log in the first week with one row per source: full citation, the specific page or section, a one-line statement of what the item actually establishes, the family it belongs to, and the date you checked it. A source then enters a draft in four moves. Read it in the original. Record its claim in your own words with the location attached. Decide which sentence of your argument it supports. Write that sentence and attach the citation. Nothing gets cited that was not read. Confirm the citation style and any limits on outside material against the live instructions, since the registered classroom controls which resources are permitted here.

Three opening-week pitfalls and their fixes

The first pitfall is the summary paper. A draft recounts a situation at length, offers a short verdict, and every analysis row scores low because the reader never sees reasoning happen. The fix is a ratio rule: hold description to roughly a fifth of the response, and make each descriptive sentence earn its place by feeding a later claim. If a fact would not change the recommendation, cut it.

The second is the framework label with no work behind it. Naming a theory and then arguing from intuition is one of the most common ways to lose points early in an ethics course. The fix is to make the framework do visible labor. If the reasoning turns on consequences, list the affected groups with the specific harms and benefits. If it turns on duties or rights, name the duty, the party who holds it, and the party who owes it. The reader should see machinery, not a sticker.

The third is a scope mismatch. Opening drafts often answer a far larger question than the one asked, spending paragraphs on an industry when the prompt concerned a single decision. The fix is to reread the prompt after drafting, highlight every noun that sets scope, and delete any paragraph serving a noun the prompt never mentioned. Where this general guidance and the posted prompt disagree, follow the prompt.

Source boundary

Aspen University's official FAQ verifies that courses run eight weeks and that each Week's activities are organized in the online-classroom syllabus. The active catalog verifies this course code and title. Neither public source identifies the student's current Week 1 activity, so this manual never assigns it one.

Week 1 questions