Critical Reasoning

Reva: Using extraneous incentives to get teenagers to change their attitude toward school and schoolwork won’t work. Take the program in West Virginia, for instance, where they tried to reduce their dropout rate by revoking the driving licenses of kids who left school. The program failed miserably.

Anne: It’s true that the West Virginia program failed, but many schools have devised incentive programs that have been very successful in improving attendance and reducing discipline problems.

According to Anne, the weak point in Reva’s claim is that it

(A) fails to consider the possibility that the majority of potential dropouts in West Virginia do not have driving licenses
(B) doesn’t provide any exact figures for the dropout rate in West Virginia before and during the program
(C) ignores a substantial body of evidence showing that parents and employers have been using extrinsic incentives with positive results for years
(D) assumes that a positive incentive—a prize or a reward—will be no more effective than a negative incentive, like the revoking of a driving license
(E) is based on a single example, the incentive program in West Virginia, which may not be typical

OA is E. I can't understand why the answer is not D

- Two speaker Stimuli, Author gives the view point of one and strongly disagrees with one view point and provides the another reason.
- Successful Incentive Programs --> Improves Attendance and Reducing
Discipline Probs.
- To weaken Reva's Claim, Anne points out the above reasoning.
- Reva's claims giving a single sample whereas Anne's claims provides data from many sucessful Programs.

Hence Ans E.

Regards,
Karthi

for this kind of question

Justify every word in answer choices

E is correct.

A lot of people fall for D because they assume "incentive" means a positive inducement -- a carrot, in the sense of "carrot or stick." So they think Anne is contrasting a positive incentive with a punishment. But when Reva made the original claims, she also used the word "incentive" and then talked about the West Virginia program as an example. So it's clear that in the context of this problem, "incentive" doesn't just mean "positive reward." It means any kind of punishment or reward used to motivate behavior. Choice D talks about "positive incentive" or "negative incentive," but I think most people don't realize that when they read what Anne said, they jumped to the conclusion that she meant positive incentives.

In any case, Anne can't be contrasting positive versus negative, because if you don't assume "incentive" has to mean something positive -- and here it doesn't -- there's nothing in what she said that means she's necessarily talking about anything positive.

In GMAT terms Anne tries to clearly pin point the statistical flaw or the sampling flaw of Reva's anlysis.

Clearly option E indicates this.

First thing I fell for D as well

The objective is to weaken Raven argument. The way I have understood that D is wrong is because reva never assumed or talked about any positive incentive, she just talked about extraneous factors. hence if i am Anna i can not assume such a thing because reva never talked about it.

is this the right way to understand the argument