Essential question: What verification habits prevent urgency, authority, fear, or opportunity from defeating financial judgment?
Instructional caution: Distinguish factual definitions, legal holdings, economic relationships, value judgments, and policy preferences. Do not grade students for political viewpoint; grade evidence, accuracy, reasoning, citation, and disciplinary method.
Analyze a realistic scam message, identify persuasion techniques and technical indicators, and document an independent verification path.
Create a personal financial-security checklist and incident-response plan.
Instructional aim: Define the Week 17 problem, establish the relevant institutions or economic relationships, and construct an initial answer to the essential question.
Evidence of learning: Identify one distinction that prevents a common oversimplification of this topic.
Support: Provide a vocabulary preview, chunked text, text-to-speech, and claim/evidence sentence frames.
Extension: Identify a competing theoretical interpretation and describe what evidence could distinguish it.
Instructional aim: Evaluate a primary record, legal case, policy document, contract, or institutional source for authority, evidence, context, and limitation.
Evidence of learning: State one claim the focal record supports and one claim it cannot establish alone.
Support: Define specialized language, provide a structured annotation guide, and allow oral rehearsal before writing.
Extension: Locate a source from a different institutional or social position and explain how it confirms, complicates, or contradicts the first.
Instructional aim: Interpret a quantitative model, institutional process, financial calculation, or policy tradeoff without confusing description and causation.
Evidence of learning: Explain which conclusion remains valid after the changed assumption and which conclusion does not.
Support: Provide labeled examples, formulas or process steps, and a partially completed model.
Extension: Perform a sensitivity analysis or compare an alternative policy/institutional design.
Instructional aim: Construct and defend a precise claim using disciplinary evidence, a counterclaim, and a proportionate conclusion.
Evidence of learning: Explain why the counterclaim deserves a response rather than dismissal.
Support: Use claim-evidence-reasoning frames and permit an audio or oral draft before the final written product.
Extension: Rewrite the recommendation for an audience with a different role, jurisdiction, time horizon, or risk tolerance.
Instructional aim: Demonstrate weekly mastery, correct misconceptions, and transfer the central concept to a new case.
Evidence of learning: Apply the week’s reasoning to this mastery action: A student stops, independently verifies through a trusted channel, refuses unusual payment methods, and reports compromise immediately.
Support: Allow extended time, reduced-distraction setting, read-aloud where appropriate, and repeated attempts after documented correction.
Extension: Write one high-quality examination question and an answer key explaining why each distractor is wrong.
Each principal assignment is worth 30 points: 8 accuracy, 8 evidence or calculation, 6 reasoning, 4 counterargument/limitation, and 4 clarity/citation. Use the course rubrics for expanded descriptors.
| # | Question | Answer | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Which definition best matches “phishing”? | B | Phishing means a fraudulent attempt to obtain information or payment through deceptive communication. |
| 2 | Which definition best matches “social engineering”? | B | Social engineering means manipulation of people into revealing information or taking unsafe action. |
| 3 | Which definition best matches “impersonation scam”? | A | Impersonation scam means fraud in which a criminal pretends to be government, business, family, or another trusted person. |
| 4 | Which definition best matches “multifactor authentication”? | A | Multifactor authentication means use of more than one category of evidence to verify access. |
| 5 | Which definition best matches “wire fraud”? | D | Wire fraud means a scheme using electronic communication or transfer systems to obtain money or property by deception. |
| 6 | Which definition best matches “recovery scam”? | A | Recovery scam means a fraud targeting prior victims with promises to recover lost money for a fee. |
| 7 | Which statement is most consistent with the evidence and reasoning developed in Week 17? | D | Urgency, secrecy, unusual payment methods, remote access, and threats are common scam indicators. |
| 8 | Which statement is most consistent with the evidence and reasoning developed in Week 17? | B | Independent verification uses a trusted contact method rather than links or numbers supplied by the suspicious message. |
| 9 | Which statement is most consistent with the evidence and reasoning developed in Week 17? | D | Fast reporting to financial institutions, platforms, law enforcement, and identity-theft systems can limit loss. |
| 10 | Which action best demonstrates mastery of the Week 17 inquiry? | B | A student stops, independently verifies through a trusted channel, refuses unusual payment methods, and reports compromise immediately. |
Who should bear losses when a scam succeeds because both a consumer and a financial system failed to detect it?
5 points: clear claim, accurate disciplinary reasoning, two specific pieces of evidence, meaningful qualification or counterargument, and complete explanation.