Once you’ve considered each factor used in evaluating a source, it’s important to take a look at the inferences you made about them. Now is the time to look at those grades all together—to average them if you’ve been assigning grades—and to make one more inference.
Taking the grade on each factor into account, can you infer that the source is relevant and credible enough for your purpose? If it isn’t, this is one source that can’t be helpful in your project. If it is relevant and credible enough, you can use information from that resource with confidence.
Making the Final Inference
Assume you’re writing a term paper and are considering using information from Site XYZ. You ran through the evaluation process as you looked over the site, and you made notes about the grades you assigned.
The grades you gave individual factors are:
- Neighborhood: A
- Author/publisher’s background: B
- Degree of bias: A
- Recognition from others: No Evidence
- Thoroughness: C
- Currency of the content: A
You average the grades (A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1, F=0), remembering not to include the factor on which you gave no grade. The score was 3.4, about a B, which is a “Good, but could be better” score on the scale we used in this tutorial. You decide to use information from this site in your project.
- A – Very Acceptable
- B – Good, but could be better
- C – OK in a pinch
- D – Marginal
- F – Unacceptable
