The task
The two articles below take opposite positions on one question:
Should the state end the tipped minimum wage and require restaurants to pay the full minimum wage instead?
Read both. Then analyze both positions to determine which one is better supported by evidence. Use specific evidence from both articles in your answer.
You are not being asked which side you agree with, and you will not be scored on which one you choose. You are being asked to judge the arguing — and either article can be argued for. Allow about 45 minutes.
Article 1
Put It in the Wage
1In this state the tipped minimum wage is $10.65 an hour. The full minimum is $16.50. The law says tips are supposed to close that $5.85, and that on any week when they do not, the employer must make up the difference. That is a good rule. The way it is enforced is that a worker notices the shortfall on her own stub, works out what she is owed, files a complaint against the person who writes her schedule, and waits.
2The state labor department received 1,240 wage complaints from restaurant workers over the past three years. In 71 percent of them, the complaint was that the employer had not covered the gap.
3A tip is also not a neutral measure of the work. A 2021 study looked at 9,400 credit card receipts across 42 restaurants and compared tips left for servers whose names the researchers coded as Black or Hispanic with tips left for servers whose names they coded as white. On comparable checks at the same restaurants, the first group averaged 1.8 percentage points less.
4It can be done here. Three restaurants in this city went to a flat $28 an hour with no tipping in 2022, all three under one owner. He reports that annual turnover on the floor fell from 94 percent to 31 percent in the two years since, and that he no longer trains a new server every three weeks.
5A wage is a number you can take to a landlord. A tip is a number you hope for on a Tuesday in February when it is raining and the room is empty. Every server I know has done that arithmetic. What I am asking is that we stop calling the second one pay.
Article 2
Don't Take the Tip
1I am one of the people this law is meant to rescue. I have read it, and I do not want it.
2Here is my own arithmetic, from my own pay stubs. Over the past twelve months my tips and wage together averaged $34.20 an hour. Three blocks from me there is a restaurant that went no-tipping, added a 20 percent service charge, and pays its floor staff a flat $25. Four people have left there to come work with us in the last two years. They did not do it for the principle.
3This has been tried here, and not in three restaurants. Between 2016 and 2023, 21 restaurants in this city announced they were going no-tipping. Fourteen of them went back within two years. Two closed. The owners who reverted said much the same thing in interviews afterward: once the labor cost was inside the menu price, a $26 entrée sat next to a $21 entrée at the place across the street, guests read the difference as expensive, and they stopped coming. Seven kept it. I am not saying it cannot work. I am saying two out of three tries here ended with the staff back on tips anyway, after a year of smaller checks.
4I asked the eleven servers who work my floor whether they would look for another job if we moved to a flat wage. Nine said yes.
5Ms. Fortune's complaint numbers describe a law that is not being enforced. I agree with her about that, and it is a different problem with a different fix: fund the inspectors, raise the tipped minimum, make the penalty hurt. Do not solve an enforcement failure by taking away the part of the job that actually pays.
Your 45 minutes
Stop here if you have not written yet. What follows names the evidence in both articles and shows where each one is weak. Read it before you write and you will not be practicing the thing the test measures — which is finding all of this yourself, in forty-five minutes, with nobody helping.
After the clock — what was actually on the table
What each article put in front of you
Put It in the Wage
- The law, stated plainly, with the numbers in it. $10.65, $16.50, $5.85, and — the part that matters — how the rule is enforced.
- State administrative data. 1,240 complaints, 71 percent on one issue.
- A controlled study. 9,400 receipts, 42 restaurants, comparable checks at the same restaurants. That last phrase is the study doing the work: it holds the restaurant constant.
- A case. Three restaurants, turnover 94 percent to 31 percent.
Don't Take the Tip
- Her own pay stubs, with a figure. $34.20 an hour, over twelve months — the most directly verifiable number in either passage.
- A natural comparison three blocks away. $25 flat at the service-charge house, and four workers who moved from it to her restaurant.
- A count of attempts and outcomes, including the ones against her. 21 restaurants tried it over seven years, 14 reverted, 2 closed — and seven kept it, which she says out loud. A writer who reports the part of her own evidence that cuts against her is telling you she has not hidden anything else either, and a reader weighs her differently for it.
- A poll of her coworkers. Eleven asked, nine answered yes.
- A concession with a counter-proposal. She grants Fortune's strongest evidence and argues it points somewhere else.
Where each one is thin
Neither article is the better one. Each has evidence a careful reader can push on, and naming that pressure — in specific words, about a specific sentence — is most of what the first scoring trait rewards.
Put It in the Wage
- Complaints count complaints, not violations. Nobody in that 1,240 has been found to have been underpaid; they have alleged it. And complaints come from workers who noticed and had the standing to file — which is not a picture of the industry, it is a picture of the industry's complainers.
- The turnover figure comes from the owner. Three restaurants, one interested source, no audit. Fortune criticizes employers for self-serving conduct and then relies on an employer's self-report.
- 1.8 percentage points is a small effect, reported without its spread. The study design is good. The passage does not say how much of the variation it explains, or whether the gap held at every check size.
- Paragraph 5 is the best writing in the passage and the weakest evidence. “Every server I know” is not a measurement.
Don't Take the Tip
- $34.20 an hour is her restaurant. She never says what kind of room it is or where. A server at a diner in a neighborhood with no expense accounts has a different number, and the law would reach both.
- Fourteen of twenty-one reverted — and she does not say why, except through owners. “The owners said” is a source with an obvious interest, the same problem Fortune has in her paragraph 4.
- Eleven servers, on her own floor, asked by her. The smallest sample in either passage, and the one most exposed to who was asking.
- Four people moving between two restaurants explains itself several ways. Money is one. Schedule, management, and commute are others. The passage names only the one that helps it.
Two essays, either of which could score well
If both of those look like real essays to you, the set is working as intended. On the test you will have two articles built the same way, and no time to find the perfect answer, because there isn't one. Pick the side you can support in forty-five minutes and support it.
Check your own
The Extended Response is scored on three traits. Read your draft against them, one at a time — and then read How the essay is scored, which has the full rubric and two responses to the same task, one earning a 6 and one earning about a 2.
- Analysis of argument and evidence. Did you say which article is better supported, in a sentence, near the beginning? Did you quote or name specific evidence from both articles — not just the one you chose? Did you say what is wrong with the evidence on at least one side, rather than only what is right?
- Development and organization. Does each paragraph do one job? Does a reader who has not seen the articles know what they said? Did you get to the end, or did you run out of clock in the middle of a paragraph?
- Clarity and command of English. Read it aloud. Sentences that you stumble over reading are sentences a scorer stumbles over too. Check that every sentence has a subject and a verb and ends where it should.
One more, which is not on the rubric and costs you the most: did you argue about which side is right instead of which side is better supported? That essay can be beautifully written and still score low, because it answers a question nobody asked.