GMAT Essays (AWA)

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Prompt:
The following appeared in the editorial section of a corporate newsletter:

"The common notion that workers are generally apathetic about management issues is false, or at least outdated: a recent published survey indicates that 79% of the nearly 1,200 workers who responded to survey questionnaires expressed a high level of interest in the topics of corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programs."

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“The common notion that workers are generally apathetic about management issues is false, or at least outdated”, so claims the editorial section of a corporate newsletter. The evidence cited is that 79% of the 1,200 workers who responded to the questions of a survey have expressed significant interest in the topics of the corporate restructuring and redesign of benefits programs. This argument relies heavily on several logical fallacies that I will discuss. First, a generalization is utilized, as the readers never find whether a majority of the people who saw the survey answered, or just the majority of those who did answer – answered positively. Second, even if their answers are taken as a fact, nothing connects the idea workers are interested in programs directly affecting them, to other general management issues. Lastly, the readers do not know for a fact how scientifically the answers were collected. It is a known fact that nearly 90% of all statistics can be made to show whatever results the author is interested in. I will proceed to make some sense of this

The readers find out that 79% of the nearly 1,200 workers, who have responded to the survey, did indeed express interest in what the author calls “management issues. Imagine the population of workers to whom the survey was sent was above 10,000 people – it is clear that 79% of 1,200 when compared to a much larger population who has not even bothered to answer, is far from proving the author’s point. Quite on the contrary, if the population which has answered is a minority of that which was asked but never answered, the opposite view is proved to that which is argued for. The majority of workers who received the survey but failed to answer show that it is true they could not care less about such management issues and often such surveys are used to tackle.

The argument attempts to prove that the public of workers is interested in tackling or at least giving their input in regards to management issues. The fallacy comes into play when attempting to define those issues. One may consider such issues as those that have an influence on the company and not necessarily on the individual worker. The fact the majority of those who answered the survey were interested in issues that relate to the company may as well be true, but does not render them as altruistic and invested as the author attempts to portray. The workers who responded were interested perhaps only in those issues that have a direct influence on their benefits.

Lastly, a doubt should be cast as to the method of this research. Perhaps the workers were given some incentive to answer the survey “correctly” in a monetary or another way? Also, who had access to the responses of the workers, and what are the chances the responses do not directly reflect their honest thoughts? This may seriously change the dependability of this research.

Above I think it is clear beyond any doubt that this argument has several serious flaws that damage its credibility. First discussed was the statistical generalization that could easily form the wrong impression by omitting the information regarding how many people initially received the survey, second, by incorrectly defining “management issues” and clearly misunderstanding what exactly the workers were invested in, and third, by not clarifying the scientific and honest environment in which this research was conducted. This argument may have had better feet to stand on if there was a clarification of which and how many workers were surveyed, what considerations were taken into account to protect the privacy of their answers as well as defining all related term correctly.