[1] For most of the twentieth century, the answer to “where do you work?” was simple: at the office, or wherever the job physically required you to be. The idea that large numbers of people might do their jobs from home, connected only by a laptop and an internet line, was a fringe arrangement, offered to a few employees as a rare favor. Within the span of a few years, that arrangement moved from the margins to the center of how many companies operate.
[2] The shift happened quickly and out of necessity. When circumstances in the early 2020s forced many offices to close, millions of workers who had never worked remotely found themselves doing so almost overnight. Companies that had long assumed such an arrangement was impossible discovered that a great deal of work could, in fact, be done from a kitchen table. Software for video meetings and shared documents, once a minor category, became standard equipment.
[3] The results were mixed, and both sides of the debate can point to real evidence. Surveys of remote workers have repeatedly found that most report being at least as productive at home as in the office, and many report being more so, citing fewer interruptions and no commute. One large 2023 survey found that a majority of remote-capable employees said they would look for a new job if required to return to the office full time. At the same time, some managers reported that collaboration suffered, that new employees learned more slowly without experienced coworkers nearby, and that the informal conversations that spark ideas were harder to reproduce on a screen.
[4] By the middle of the decade, a tug-of-war had set in. Some companies embraced permanent remote or “hybrid” schedules, in which employees split their week between home and office. Others began requiring workers to return to their desks for a set number of days, and a few ordered a full return, arguing that being together in person was essential to how they operated. Workers and employers frequently disagreed about which arrangement served everyone best, and the disagreement was rarely only about productivity.
[5] Underneath the practical questions sat harder ones about trust, fairness, and what an office is actually for. Is a workplace mainly a location where tasks are completed, or is it also a community where people learn from one another and build the relationships that advance a career? Does measuring an employee by hours seen at a desk make sense when the work itself can be measured directly? These questions did not have obvious answers, and how a company answered them increasingly shaped who wanted to work there.
[6] What is clear is that the simple old answer is gone. “Where do you work?” has become a real question again, with real consequences, and the way a society answers it will shape its offices, its commutes, and its neighborhoods for years to come.
[1] The current wave of return-to-office mandates rests on a comfortable assumption: that a worker at a desk, visible to a manager, is doing more and better work than the same worker at home. It is a comfortable assumption because it is easy to enforce and easy to picture. It is also, for a great deal of modern work, simply wrong.
[2] Consider what a mandate actually measures. Requiring an employee to sit at a particular desk from nine to five measures attendance, not output. For work that produces something countable — reports written, cases closed, code shipped, customers helped — the results can be measured directly, and a worker who delivers them from a spare bedroom has delivered them just as fully as one who delivers them from a cubicle. Judging such a worker by where they sat while doing it is like judging a novel by the room it was written in.
[3] The strongest case against blanket mandates is not that offices are useless. It is that a single rule imposed on everyone ignores how different the work and the workers are. Some tasks genuinely require a room and a whiteboard. Some employees focus better among colleagues, or lack a workable space at home, and for them the office is a lifeline, not a burden. A flexible policy can give those people exactly what they need. A blanket mandate cannot give the others what they need; it can only override them.
[4] It is fair to grant the other side its best point. In-person time does help new employees learn, and a purely remote workplace can leave junior staff without the informal mentorship that experience provides. This is a real cost, and it is worth taking seriously. But it argues for bringing people together deliberately — for the training, the collaboration, the moments that genuinely need a shared room — not for chaining everyone to a desk five days a week on the chance that something useful might happen nearby.
[5] There is also a matter of respect. Telling capable adults that their proven work does not count unless it is performed in a specific building sends a message, and workers hear it clearly: we do not trust you, and we would rather watch you than measure you. That message is expensive. It drives away exactly the experienced people a company can least afford to lose, and the recent surveys of workers ready to quit over mandates are the bill coming due.
[6] The question is not whether offices have value. They do. The question is whether that value is best captured by a rule that treats every worker and every task as identical. It is not. The employers who thrive will be the ones who ask what each job actually requires, and then let people work where they work best.
Your response should include:
Being able to explain and defend your thinking matters as much as choosing the right answer. After you finish on your own, trade papers with a partner and work through these steps together. The goal is not to find out who is right — it is to leave with a clearer reason for your answer than you had before.
Then revise your own work based on what the conversation surfaced. Disagreement is useful; a reason you can say out loud is the thing you are really practicing.
— End of Student-Facing Test —
For instructor use — not for distribution to students
This set is built to mirror the real GED RLA exam closely: an informational passage (Passage 1) paired with an argumentative passage (Passage 2) on a current workplace issue, plus an extended response built on two opposing views — the exact shape of the GED essay. The GED draws about 75% of its passages from informational sources on workplace, science, and social-studies topics, so this configuration is more typical of the exam than a pair of personal essays. Skills covered match the official GED list: main idea, stated detail, inference, author's purpose, point of view and tone, distinguishing fact from opinion, vocabulary in context, the relationship between evidence and a claim, and comparing two passages (Question 20).
Both passages were written for this practice set. The survey figures in Passage 1 are illustrative and should not be cited as real statistics; use them to teach how a reader evaluates the use of evidence, not whether they can verify a number. Passage 2 argues a position and is meant to be evaluated, not accepted. The extended response supplies an opposing letter so a student can argue either side; the score depends on the quality of support, not which side is chosen.
Peer review is built into this set on purpose. Explaining a correct answer to a peer, and defending it against a reasonable challenge, is where a memorized answer and an understood answer separate. This set is deliberately printed without an answer key so that the conversation, not a letter in a table, does the teaching.
The paragraph contains ten errors: six subject-verb agreement errors (singular subjects such as remote work, an employee, and trusting, and the plural subjects managers and benefits), one comma splice, one missing introductory comma, one sentence fragment beginning with a relative pronoun (“Which is a more accurate way...”), and one than/then error. Have students find and justify each fix in their own words, then compare corrections with a partner and name the rule at every difference. If a student catches fewer than five, reteach subject-verb agreement first, since it accounts for most of the errors here.
| Score | Description |
|---|---|
| 4 | Takes a clear position on which argument is better supported and sustains it. Uses specific evidence from Passage 2, the opposing letter, and Passage 1, drawing on the informational passage's facts as evidence for the argument. Identifies a real weakness in the rejected position (for example, that the letter treats flexibility and mentorship as mutually exclusive, when a deliberate-gathering policy could provide both). Organized, controlled sentences, few conventions errors. |
| 3 | Clear position with relevant evidence from at least two of the three sources. Addresses the opposing side, though the weakness identified may be general. Mostly organized; conventions errors do not obscure meaning. |
| 2 | Position stated but unevenly supported; leans on one source or on personal opinion. Opposing view mentioned but not analyzed. Organization loose; conventions errors sometimes interfere. |
| 1 | Position unclear or shifting. Little textual evidence, or summary substituted for analysis. Frequent conventions errors that interfere with meaning. |
| 0 | No discernible position, or the response does not engage the passages. |
Note on scoring: a student may argue either position and earn a 4. The score reflects the quality of support, not which side the student chose. This pairs naturally with peer review: have two students who argued opposite sides exchange essays and each name the strongest point the other made.