To me, this question is an example of typical GMAT pedantry. Personally, I think this sentence should be thrown out. There aren't any good answers IMO. This seems to be one of those instances in which the test-writers are merely trying to trick you, and come up with an answer that they deem to be correct but that sounds very awkward. Does a question like this really test anything meaningful?
In reading this sentence, I interpret "founding" to mean "setting up" or "starting" the school. Now, is it very likely that the decision to accept both male and female students was made at precisely the moment that the school was "founded"? No. The founders probably had this idea floating around in their heads years before, so the "decision" probably took place long before the "founding." Besides, it was not their "decision" per se that was momentous--it was the policy (i.e., the eventual implementation of the decision) of the newly created school that made it a renegade.
Choice D), deemed the correct answer by the so-called experts who write the GMAT, has two problems:
1) It makes the sentence sound as if the decision to accept male and female students was made at the very moment of OC's founding, an image that is confusing and ambiguous at best, and inaccurate at worst. It's as if the buildings were all going up, and then one of the founders suddenly had a V8 moment: "Hey, dudes! I just thought of something. Let's allow chicks at this school too!!! Whoa, I mean wouldn't that be like majorly cool??? You know????"
That's the impression that choice D) gives.2) As Acorn wrote earlier, D) also implies that it was the exact timing of the decision, i.e., at the founding, that truly made Oberlin College a renegade, a notion that is imprecise at best and just plain wrong at worst. What if the decision had come a month later? Would Oberlin College not have been a renegade then?
To convey the correct meaning, the sentence should be reworded like this:
Founded in 1833, Oberlin College in Ohio was a renegade institution for its time in that it allowed the admission of both men and women as students.
or
Founded in 1833, Oberlin College in Ohio was a renegade institution for its time in allowing the admission of both men and women as students.
Both sentences above are clear and precise, and sound reasonably smooth. They also eliminate the needless word "decision" and focus on the fact that it was OC's adopted policy, not the initial decision per se, that ultimately made OC a renegade institution. In addition, they remove the awkward phrase "at its founding," which just muddies the intended meaning of the sentence. So, why didn't the "geniuses" who make the GMAT write the sentence in this fashion? Probably because they were trying to make the sentence along with the intended answer confusing and awkward.
In a nutshell, the original question is a very poor one. There should be a single answer that is clearly and unambiguously correct, but, as unfortunately happens all too often on the GMAT, there really is not IMO.
Besides, who's to say that these so-called experts who write the GMAT are always "correct"? The verbal questions are often subjective, so the "correctness" of the answers often simply comes down to educated opinion, not absolute fact. If we polled, say, 500 English professors at universities throughout the U.S. and gave them this exact same question, do you think every single one of them would pick choice D)???? I suspect not. In fact, I would wager that quite a few of them would reject choice D). And I would say that unless all 500 of them (or at least 498
) agree on choice D), you have a poor question that should be thrown out.On the other hand, if you gave 500 university math professors a math problem from the GMAT, wouldn't they most likely all agree on the answer? Factoring out carelessness, yes. And even if some had been careless, I think they would ultimately see that they had been mistaken. So, in the end it's safe to say that you could indeed get all 500 professors to agree on the correct answer to a valid math question.
This shows why the verbal sections, at least, should be taken with a grain of salt, because there's a lot of subjectivity going on--and no independent advisory panel (i.e., one not in any way affiliated with the GMAT) to counteract such subjectivity. Furthermore, in the real business world, do minute, nitpicking distinctions in language, such as what the "experts" are often testing on SC questions like these, really play an important part? I suspect most people in business would say "no."
