chendawg wrote:After analyzing this problem some more, I've come to the conclusion that I don't like this question lol. What's the source? If I had to pick an answer, I'd pick A. Here's how I thought of it:

Premises - 80% of potential donors contacted gave money. Old donors more likely to give money. Good fundraisers target new donor base.

Sub-conclusion - High success rates show that fundraisers only targeted old donors, does not mean good job done.

Conclusion - High success rate shows the fundraisers didn't widen their base, thus the fundraisers were not successful.

(A) Smithtown University's fund-raisers were successful in their contacts with potential donors who had never given before about as frequently as were fund-raisers for other universities in their contacts with such people.

Slightly strengthen. We don't know whether other universities' contact with potential donors who had never given before is considered successful. It could be that 10% of new donors donating is considered a success or 40% of new donors donating is considered a success. But at least the university is on par with everyone else.


OA is A.

Yes the OA is "A". I found this problem on Gmatclub.

(B) This year the average size of the donations to Smithtown University from new donors when the university's fund-raisers had contacted was larger than the average size of donations from donors who had given to the university before.

Irrelevant. We don't care about the size the donations. We care about WHERE the donations came from, new donors or old.

(C) This year most of the donations that came to Smithtown University from people who had previously donated to it were made without the university's fund-raisers having made any contact with the donors.

Weaken. This shows that the donations were mostly people who had donated before, and these people donated without ANY contact with the donors. This means the fundraisers were busy with non-old(read: new) donors.

(D) The majority of the donations that fund-raisers succeeded in getting for Smithtown University this year were from donors who had never given to the university before.

Weaken. This would show new donors made up more than half of the 80% of potential donors.

(E) More than half of the money raised by Smithtown University's fund-raisers came from donors who had never previously donated to the university.

Irrelevant. Although more than half the money could be from new donors, one new donor could have represented all of the new donor money.