Critical Reasoning

The trustees of the Avonbridge summer drama workshop have decided to offer scholarships to the top 10 percent of local applicants and the top 10 percent of non local applicants as judged on the basis of a qualifying audition. They are doing this to ensure that only the applicants with the most highly evaluated auditions are offered scholarships to the program.


Which one of the following points out why the trustees' plan might not be effective in achieving its goal?

(A) The best actors can also apply for admission to another program and then not enrol in the Avonbridge program

(B) Audition materials that produce good results for one actor may disadvantage another, resulting in inaccurate assessment

(C) The top 10 percent of local and nonlocal applicants might not need scholarships to the Avonbridge program

(D) Some of the applicants who are offered scholarships could have less highly evaluated auditions than some of the applicants who are not offered scholarships

(E) Dividing applicants into local and nonlocal groups is unfair because it favours non local applicants

Let's start analyzing the argument by understanding what is the conclusion:

Conclusion is : Only the applicants with the most highly evaluated auditions are offered scholarships.
Now see which of the options weakens the conclusion
A - Not relevant. Enrolling has nothing to do with scholarships offered or not.
B - Looks tempting but it does not relate to scholarships offering to most evaluated members. Conclusion is about the number of evaluations and not about the quality.
C - Not relevant
D - Could be a possible choice since it negates the conclusion
E - Irrelevant
and hence the OA should be D

Hi,

I believe Option E would be the possible answer. As the plan was to provide scholarship to top 10 locals and top 10 non locals. There might be a situation where those between top 10 and 20 ( and who are locals) have better talent than the top 10 non locals.

Br,
Vishnu.

I was between B and D and will go with B as my final choice because D is not pointing to the reason why the plan might not be effective, but B is.

I choose D

The author is question the process but not the audition itself. This pertains to the process by which they choose the highest evaluated auditions.

Option B does not directly pertain to this since it only talks about the audition materials which does not pertian the the arguement/conlusion.

Option D explain the paradox. For ed the 11th highest evaluated local applicant might still be higher than the 1st ranking non local applicant. So the process is not really robust to state that evaluations are the manner in which scholarships are granted.

Hope this helps.

When I first read the argument, my first thought was "percents... beware percents... GMAT likes to trick people with percents and numbers." I also immeadiately thought that since the trustees wanted the most highly evaluated auditions, would the percentile rankings capture the appropriate number of highly evaluated candidates. The trustees think that their method will ENSURE... i.e. guarantee that they will have the most highly evaluated candidates. And then I thought "local = likely small, what if it means the county or city?" Non-local = everyone else in the country and world... big sample. So, quantitatively speaking, odds are that you will have MORE highly evaluated candidates in a larger sample size than in a smaller sample size. So, the trustees might not be capturing all of the highly evaluated auditions, which is their goal.

A) This does not even make sense. We are talking about this program and the trustees' goal.

B) Audition materials? But who has the audition materials? We are talking about the plan of the trustees and how the plan to capture the top applicants from the local and non-local pool. And if everyone has the audition materials, wouldn't that ensure that everyone has an equal score, regardless of applicant pool? The prompt does not say who has the audition materials.

C) It mentions the applicant pool, but we are not trying to determine whether the top applicants need scholarships or not. It has been established that scholarships will be given to top applicants. This is changing the premise and adding info to the question, and does nothing to evaluate the trustees' goal.

D) "Some of the applicants who are offered scholarships.." Ok, so we are specifically talking about the top ten percent of the local and non-local applicants "... could have less highly evaluated auditions than some of the applicants who are not offered scholarships." So this is saying that scholarship applicants from one pool may or may not have had lower evaluations than those who did not make the cut in the other pool. If yes, then the trustees failed at their goal.. they did not ENSURE that the school had the best applicants. If no, then the trustees succeeded in their plan.

E) This stem is hinting at the larger issue of the trustees' plan, because some applicants in the one group may have higher scores than those in the other. But unfair? Sounds like an opinion. Opinions are one-sided. They do not evaluate. And non-local applicants? Favors? I don't think the trustees are favoring one over the other. What if there are 100 local applicants and 5000 non-local applicants? The absolute number of applicants is not explained.

The trustees of the Avonbridge summer drama workshop have decided to offer scholarships to the top 10 percent of local applicants and the top 10 percent of non local applicants as judged on the basis of a qualifying audition. They are doing this to ensure that only the applicants with the most highly evaluated auditions are offered scholarships to the program.

Which one of the following points out why the trustees' plan might not be effective in achieving its goal?

(A) The best actors can also apply for admission to another program and then not enrol in the Avonbridge program

(B) Audition materials that produce good results for one actor may disadvantage another, resulting in inaccurate assessment

(C) The top 10 percent of local and nonlocal applicants might not need scholarships to the Avonbridge program

(D) Some of the applicants who are offered scholarships could have less highly evaluated auditions than some of the applicants who are not offered scholarships

(E) Dividing applicants into local and nonlocal groups is unfair because it favours non local applicants

This is a PLANNING argument.
The PLAN Is to offer scholarships to the top 10% of each group (local applicants and non-local applicants).
The CONCLUSION is that only applicants with the most highly evaluated auditions will be offered scholarships.
The assumption is that there is NO PROBLEM WITH THE PLAN: that nothing will prevent the plan from working.

The trustees' plan will work only if the two groups -- the local applicants and the non-local applicants -- are THE SAME.
Imagine the following:
All 100 of the LOCAL applicants receive an audition score between 90 and 100.
All 100 of the NON-LOCAL applicants receive an audition score between 5 and 10.
In this case, the top 10 non-local applicants will be granted scholarships, even though their audition scores are much LOWER than the 90 local applicants who are NOT offered scholarships.
Answer choice D points out this problem with the plan:
If the plan is implemented, some of the applicants who are offered scholarships could have less highly evaluated auditions than some of the applicants who are not offered scholarships.

The correct answer is D.