Score three laptops
kind: drill
Build a weighted scoring for buying a laptop for school use, with at least five criteria and three alternatives of your choice.
Solution
Any table works if the criteria discriminate. A common mistake is a criterion like "has a keyboard": every alternative scores 10 and the criterion contributes nothing but its weight to every column equally. Compare your criteria against that test before you rate anything.
Break your own table
kind: drill
Take the table from the previous exercise and change weights until the loser wins. Note how much you had to change.
Solution
If a small change flips the result, the alternatives are genuinely close and the table should not be presented as if it decided anything. If you had to move twenty or thirty points of weight, the result is robust — which is exactly the information you want before defending the decision.
Choose your team’s project
kind: project
Score your three candidate ideas with criteria and weights your team agrees on, fix the weights first, and put the table into your project proposal.