D357 is HRM 3550 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the WGU catalog, worth 3 competency units, and the catalog describes it as the foundations of diversity and the work of building a place where equity and inclusion support innovation. The examination risk here is unusual: the subject invites opinion, and opinion is the one thing rubrics in this course cannot score. Everything below is aimed at converting a topic people feel strongly about into a document an evaluator can mark.
Three words in the title, three different jobs
The most useful thing you can do before writing anything for this course is separate the three nouns, because assignments almost always score them separately and students routinely answer with one word for all three.
Diversity is a description of composition. It is measurable: who is present, at which levels, compared with what benchmark. Equity is a question about process and outcome fairness: whether the same performance produces the same result regardless of who delivered it, which shows up in pay, promotion rate, access to visible work and attrition. Inclusion is about experience: whether people can contribute, disagree and be heard, which is measured through survey items and through behaviour rather than through headcount.
Once separated, the deliverables become obvious. A diversity finding needs demographic data. An equity finding needs an outcome comparison between groups. An inclusion finding needs experience data. Papers that answer a composition question with a sentiment about culture lose the aspect, and the loss is invisible to the writer, which is why it repeats.
WGU records the outcome as Competent or Not Competent. There are no letter grades and no ordinary grade point average, and performance assessment work can be revised and resubmitted without a penalty attached to the result. In a subject where students hesitate for fear of saying something wrong, that matters: a clear, evidenced position that gets one aspect returned is better than a document so careful it never makes a claim.
Turning scored aspects into an assessment and plan
If your course is assessed by a performance assessment, the aspects your evaluator scores are your section list, each needing a score of 2 on its own. In this subject the aspects usually split into two halves, an assessment of the current state and a plan for change, and the halves need different writing.
Here is a conversion for a two part deliverable. Suppose your rubric shows eight scored aspects, five of them in the assessment half and three in the plan half, and you are working to about 2,400 words. Reserve 200 for a scoping paragraph and 100 for a close, leaving 2,100. Divide by aspect rather than by half: 2,100 across eight is 262 words each, so the assessment half gets about 1,310 words and the plan half about 790.
That distribution surprises people who expected the plan to dominate, and it is usually correct. Rubrics in this subject reward accurate diagnosis more heavily than ambitious proposals, because a plan built on a weak assessment is a plan that cannot be scored. Write the assessment at full weight, then let the plan be short, specific and directly attached to what you found.
A structure for a diversity, equity and inclusion deliverable
The common genre is an assessment of an organization followed by a set of recommendations, written for leadership. This layout keeps evidence and proposal from blurring into each other.
| Section | What it must contain | Type of evidence | How it fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope and definitions | What you are assessing and how you define each of the three terms | Sourced definitions | Using the three words interchangeably from the first page |
| Composition analysis | Representation overall and by level | Headcount data against a stated benchmark | No benchmark, so no finding is possible |
| Process and outcome review | Where identical inputs produce different outputs | Promotion, pay and attrition comparisons | Describing policy instead of examining outcomes |
| Experience findings | What it is like to work there, by group | Survey items, exit reasons, focus group themes | Anecdote presented as a general finding |
| Root cause discussion | Why the pattern exists in this organization | Linking findings to specific practices | Naming bias in general with no mechanism |
| Recommendations | Two or three changes with owners and sequence | Practice changes tied to named findings | A training course proposed as the answer to everything |
| Measurement | What will be tracked and how often | Baselines and targets | Targets with no baseline to move from |
| Legal and ethical boundary | What is permissible and what is not | Statute and agency guidance | Proposing something the law does not allow |
Evidence, restraint and the claims you can defend
This is a subject where the quality of the sourcing is the quality of the paper. Three families do the work. Peer reviewed research in organizational behaviour and social psychology gives you mechanisms and effect sizes, and it is the right citation for any claim that a practice changes an outcome. Government and regulator publications give you the legal boundary and the enforcement position, which matters because some well intentioned proposals are unlawful. Organizational data, whether supplied by your prompt or drawn from public workforce statistics, gives you the numbers that make a finding a finding.
Restraint is part of the craft here. Two habits protect you. First, match the strength of the claim to the strength of the evidence: a survey shows association, an experiment shows effect, and a single organization's numbers show a pattern in that organization. Second, be careful with popular interventions whose research record is mixed. Unconscious bias training is the standard example, and a paper that recommends it as a headline solution without engaging the evidence about its limits reads as underinformed. Recommending it as one component of a structural change, with the caveat stated, reads as expert.
Attach citations to the sentence carrying the claim, and keep the reference list reconciled with the body after your final edit.
What earns Competent, and what comes back
Work that passes is evidenced and specific and knows the difference between the three words in the course title. Each finding has a number or a data source behind it. Each recommendation attaches to a named finding. The measurement section could actually be executed next quarter. And nothing in it depends on the reader already agreeing.
Returns follow a recognisable shape. A paper that is an argument for why diversity matters rather than an assessment of an organization, which fails most applied aspects at once. Findings with no data. Recommendations with no owner or sequence. A measurement plan with targets and no baselines. Or a proposal that would create legal exposure, which usually costs both the recommendation aspect and any compliance aspect in one go.
Six mistakes that cost time in D357
Writing an argument instead of an assessment. The business case is usually one short section, not the paper.
Using the three terms as synonyms. Aspects are frequently written one per term, and interchangeable use loses two of the three.
Benchmark free composition data. Representation numbers mean nothing without a comparison population, and choosing one is part of the analysis.
Anecdote as evidence. One employee's experience illustrates a finding, it does not establish it. Say which it is doing.
Training as the universal remedy. Where the mechanism is a practice, the remedy is a practice change. Say what changes in the process, not just who gets educated.
Proposing what the law forbids. Preference based selection remedies have legal limits, and a recommendation that ignores them is not a strong recommendation.
How we help here, and where we stop
We work on the written deliverable: mapping the rubric, budgeting the aspects, drafting a model assessment and plan you can study and rewrite in your own words, and reading a returned evaluation to identify the exact edits that will clear it. We are a coursework support studio, not an advisory firm, so nothing we produce is a workplace intervention for a real employer to adopt. Where D357 carries an objective assessment on your plan, that exam is proctored and our role is preparation only, meaning a study plan, practice questions and an honest readiness call. We are never present during an assessment, never take one for a student, and never ask for or handle WGU portal credentials.
Writing the assessment for D357?
Send the scenario, the task instructions and the rubric. We come back with the aspect split, the data your findings need and a straight read on which claims your evidence can carry.
Three questions students ask about D357
Will my personal views affect how this course is scored?
Where do I get demographic data if my scenario does not supply any?
How many recommendations should I make?
Where D357 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 1 current WGU program. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.