L36 CASE -- CONSTRUCTED                                   Label: No AI
This case is invented. The town, the office, the people and the numbers
are made up for teaching.
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THE TOWN OF ARLOW EMERGENCY HOME-REPAIR GRANTS

Arlow's housing office gives grants for urgent home repairs to residents
on low incomes: broken heating, unsafe wiring, a leaking roof. There is
money for about 120 grants this round. About 300 applications are
expected. The round closes in 10 working days, and the office must
decide this week how applications will be ranked.

Last year the office bought a ranking tool from a vendor. The tool reads
each application and gives it a score from 0 to 100. The office funds
from the top down. The vendor's contract does not provide reasons for
individual scores, and the vendor has said it cannot produce them.

The office tested two methods on last year's 400 applications, where it
now knows which 60 households had a genuinely urgent problem:

  Method M (the vendor's tool):     58 of the 60 urgent households
                                    ranked high enough to be funded.
  Method R (a published points      49 of the 60 urgent households
  rule the office wrote: points     ranked high enough to be funded.
  for age of heating system,
  children under 5, residents
  over 75, a written inspector
  report, and so on)

With Method R, every applicant can be told exactly how many points they
received for each factor, and can challenge any factor they think is
wrong. With Method M, the office can only tell an applicant their score.

Ms Adaeze Morrow, a resident whose application was ranked low last
year, has written asking why. Her furnace failed in January. The office
cannot tell her what drove her score.

The office has two staff. A careful manual assessment takes about 40
minutes per application. Both staff also have their normal work.

You are the head of the housing office. You must choose Method M or
Method R for this round. You may add steps around your choice, but you
may not use both methods, and there is not enough staff time to assess
every application by hand.

Write:
1. Your choice: M or R.
2. The principle(s) your choice serves, quoting the excerpt(s) by number.
3. The principle(s) your choice gives up, quoting the excerpt(s).
4. What, concretely, you accept will go worse because of your choice.
5. One sentence you would send to Ms Morrow.
