GMAT Essays (AWA)

The following appeared in a report presented for discussion at a meeting of the directors of a company that manufactures parts for heavy machinery: "The falling revenues that the company is experiencing coincide with delays in manufacturing. These delays, in turn, are due in large part to poor planning in purchasing metals. Consider further that the manager of the department that handles purchasing of raw materials has an excellent background in general business, psychology, and sociology, but knows little about the properties of metals. The company should, therefore, move the purchasing manager to the sales department and bring in a scientist from the research division to be manager of the purchasing department."
Discuss how well reasoned ... etc.

The author submits flawed reasoning in his argument because he assumes that the main reason for decreasing revenues is the delay in manufacturing. He states that the reason for the falling revenues is the purchasing department, and that changing the head of the department to a scientist would resolve the revenue issue. Further to that, he implies that the purchasing department's manager is incompetent due to his lack of understanding of the properties of metal. By connecting the falling revenues to the delays in manufacturing, the author is using flawed causality. The falling revenues could be due to external forces, such as lower demand from consumers, increasing costs of materials, or over spending in other areas of the company, such as capital expenditures. If the author would have presented evidence to state that the delays in manufacturing have caused customers to move to other companies for their heavy machinery; that would have provided more compelling reasoning to state that the issue is with the purchasing department.
The idea of changing the head of the purchasing department to a scientist presents an unpersuasive solution to the falling revenue problem. Not only is the reason for falling revenues is loosely related to the purchasing department, but also there is no guarantee that the scientist would be better suited to running the purchasing department. The author states that the purchasing manager is well versed in many subjects that are helpful in business, so one can reasonably assume that he is qualified for the position. Moreover, the scientist could have very little knowledge of the business outside research; therefore the scientist could end up making the purchasing department worse off, if he or she is not well versed in the business aspects of purchasing metals.
Because the causality of the argument is flawed, the solutions to the issue are flawed. If the purchasing department is not the reason for the falling revenues and the company decides to change the head of the purchasing department, the decreasing revenues will continue. The author could have presented evidence that a comprehensive evaluation was done of all of the departments in the company and recognized that the under the current head of the purchasing department, their department has been historically over budget and consistently late with purchases and shipments. This would help make the argument that a specific person needs to change in order to increase revenues.
This argument is untenable because the author uses flawed reasons for causality and does not provide adequate evidence to support his claim that the solution to they would simply be a change in the head of the purchasing department to address the decreasing revenues.

The following is an excerpt from a memo written by the head of a governmental department:
"Neither stronger ethics regulations nor stronger enforcement mechanisms are necessary to ensure ethical behavior by companies doing business with this department. We already have a code of ethics that companies doing business with this department are urged to abide by, and virtually all of these companies have agreed to follow it. We also know that the code is relevant to the current business environment because it was approved within the last year, and in direct response to speci�c violations committed by companies with which we were then working-not in abstract anticipation of potential violations, as so many such codes are."
Discuss how well reasoned ... etc.


The argument makes several critical assumptions that weaken the conclusion. The argument states that neither stronger ethics regulations nor stronger enforcement mechanisms are necessary to ensure ethical behavior; this idea is unpersuasive because it does not take into account the company culture and accountability of the companies who do business with this governmental agency. The argument also states that "virtually all of these companies" agreed to abide by this regulation, which is questionable, because one would assume that the government would want all companies that it does business with to abide by its ethics regulations. The head of the department also fails to recognize that creating a code that is only includes fixes to previous violations, would not serve to capture any violation that was not previously reported.

Assuming that stronger enforcement mechanisms and stronger ethics regulations are not needed, the author fails to recognize that there is no guarantee that the companies abide by the ethics code. If the code is not already enforced or is enforced minimally, then companies will be able to skirt the regulation is they choose to do so. In addition, not examining stronger regulations does not allow the department to determine is the regulation is effective. If the author has presented evidence to suggest that the regulations were based on a global or country standard, then stronger regulation and enforcement may not have been necessary.

The author uses the words "virtually" to describe the amount of companies who agreed to this regulation. That implies that there are one or more companies who do not participate. This seriously weakens the argument because the fact that not all companies who do business with this department are participating in this code, suggests that there could be gaps in ethical behavior with the companies that do not adhere to the regulation. Therefore, this government would not be ensuring ethical behavior for all of its partners which can undermine the entire ethics regulation.

By presenting the fact that this ethics regulation is based on specific violations committed by companies that they have worked with, makes the authors argument untenable. By only including specific violations of which the government was aware, creates issues with the comprehensiveness of the regulation. If the author were to state that the government included incidents from the entire industry to use as a basis for its regulation, then that would have strengthened the argument.

Because the argument s makes several flawed assumptions with little evidence, this argument does not conclusively convince the reader that there is no need for stronger regulation and enforcement.