Critical Reasoning

Parents of some of the children in a particular class have claimed that the teacher is not objective and favors his male students with higher grades. But the record shown that 92% of the female students received a passing grade in this teacher's class. This record demonstrates that the teacher has not discriminated against women when assigning grades.

The argument above is flawed in that it ignored the possibility that

A. a large number of the teacher's student were in his class the previous year.

B. many teachers find it difficult to be objective when assigning grades to male and female students.

C. the evidence shows that more than 92% of the female students should have received a passing grade.

D. the majority of tests written by female students and that have been rechecked by another teacher were given a higher grade by the second teacher.

E. the teacher is biased against female students in the case of only some of the subjects he teachers.


I think the answer should be 'D'. However, the given answer is 'C'. Not sure how. Please help!

C and D are definitely the best two answers. A is irrelevant, B applies to many teachers but not necessarily this particular teacher, and E is too narrow.

I think C works pretty well. If 92% passed, but a higher percentage (say 100%) should have passed, then that's pretty clear evidence of bias.

D seems to work as well, but I think it brings up the possibility that the teacher might just be a terrible grader. It's plausible that having a second teacher recheck the tests of male students would also result in higher grades. This would be evidence of incompetence rather than bias.

This is a good example of a question where trying to put the flaw into your own words before looking at the answers can help. For me, the fact that the 92% statistic was presented and immediately used to draw a conclusion was a pretty big hint that I needed to address it with my answer.

Bill

Thanks for the explanation Bill..!! I was pretty sure it'd be 'D'. But now 'C' makes more sense.

Bill@VeritasPrep wrote:C and D are definitely the best two answers. A is irrelevant, B applies to many teachers but not necessarily this particular teacher, and E is too narrow.

I think C works pretty well. If 92% passed, but a higher percentage (say 100%) should have passed, then that's pretty clear evidence of bias.

D seems to work as well, but I think it brings up the possibility that the teacher might just be a terrible grader. It's plausible that having a second teacher recheck the tests of male students would also result in higher grades. This would be evidence of incompetence rather than bias.

This is a good example of a question where trying to put the flaw into your own words before looking at the answers can help. For me, the fact that the 92% statistic was presented and immediately used to draw a conclusion was a pretty big hint that I needed to address it with my answer.

Bill

Hello Bill,

Can you please explain me how to approach for a flaw type of questions?...
When i see the answers i found except C all are out of scope .... but i am clear what to look for when it comes to the FLAW questions....
for example:
Assumption Q: We try to find link between the premise and conclusion
Weaken/Strengthen Q: We try to weaken/support the conclusion or assumption...
evaluate Q: We try to see what weaken/strengthens the argument...

What do we do in this FLAW questions... Please explain so that it helps in future problems too... thanks...

For me, the easiest way to approach flaw questions is to look for a gap between the existing premises and the conclusion. In this case, the conclusion is that the teacher is not biased against female students, and the only piece of evidence is that 92% of female students passed. On its own, that number is essentially meaningless since there's really no context in which to evaluate that 92% number. From that, I know I need to look for something that addresses that issue. Since flaw questions are a subtype of Weaken, I also know that the answer must attack the conclusion.

This approach is also great for "useful to evaluate" questions, I've found.

Bill

Bill@VeritasPrep wrote:C and D are definitely the best two answers. A is irrelevant, B applies to many teachers but not necessarily this particular teacher, and E is too narrow.

I think C works pretty well. If 92% passed, but a higher percentage (say 100%) should have passed, then that's pretty clear evidence of bias.

D seems to work as well, but I think it brings up the possibility that the teacher might just be a terrible grader. It's plausible that having a second teacher recheck the tests of male students would also result in higher grades. This would be evidence of incompetence rather than bias.

This is a good example of a question where trying to put the flaw into your own words before looking at the answers can help. For me, the fact that the 92% statistic was presented and immediately used to draw a conclusion was a pretty big hint that I needed to address it with my answer.

Bill

...ignored the possibility that the EVIDENCE shows...

What evidence? Where did you find any evidence of that?


I was choosing between C and D. Only because of EVIDENCE I didn't choose C.

Is this question well written?