Onterra TutorIs a four day working week realistic for most organisations?
TOEFL iBT writing question in the official format, with a full model answer and notes on why it scores. Write your own version below it and get an instant rater-style score.
The question
Your professor is teaching a class on organisational behaviour. Write a post responding to the professor's question. In your response, express and support your opinion and add to the discussion in your own words. A strong response has at least 100 words.
Professor Lindqvist: A number of companies have moved to a four day working week with no cut in pay. Is a shorter week realistic for most organisations, or only for a few?
Mei: It is realistic for far more of them than people assume. The trials report the same output in fewer hours, because meetings shrink and nobody is left filling time in order to look busy.
Rafael: Those trials are mostly office work. A hospital ward, a factory line or a school cannot simply close on Friday, so a shorter week either costs more staff or quietly moves the same work onto the same people.
Model answer
Rafael has found the real limit of Mei's evidence. The trials she cites come mostly from work whose output depends on concentration, and there the wasted hours genuinely are recoverable. On a ward or in a classroom the hours are the service, and you cannot deliver four days of nursing to a patient who is ill for seven. What I would add is that this makes a shorter week expensive in those sectors rather than impossible, and expense is a political choice rather than an economic law. Countries already fund public holidays on exactly that reasoning. So my answer is that the four day week will spread quickly through desk work, arrive slowly and only with extra hiring in care work, and be judged unfairly in between.
Why this answer scores
- Identifies precisely why the evidence does not generalise, rather than simply agreeing with one side.
- The distinction between impossible and expensive is the sharpest idea in the response.
- Ends with a three part prediction, which reads as a considered position rather than a summary.
Do not memorise model answers; raters recognise recycled essays instantly. Study the moves, then make them with your own ideas, and check where you stand with a scored practice.
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