Adoption agency representative (MGMAT CAT, CR question)

[RonPurewal]

In these cases in which a premise is a concession (stated by the same author who states the conclusion), and the conclusion is "Regardless of the [concession], [opposite claim] OR [different direction]", a key assumption would be [concession] <> [same direction claim] OR [opposite of the conclusion]. Having this assumption in my queue would have give me a better chance to spot the assumption in the correct answer choice.

this is so abstract that i'm not really capable of understanding it.
if you can, then you're a lot better at thinking abstractly than i am—but, in that case, i still suspect you're making the task a lot harder than it would be if your thoughts stayed within the specifics of the situation described.

e.g.,

"if joe got a ride with his dad, then he must not have been kidnapped"
––> this is easy to understand.

"if thing X can have only one cause, then the possibility that Z caused X undermines the conclusion that Y caused X"
––> this is MUCH harder to understand. (looking back at it, i can't even process it properly—even though i just wrote it!)

the point of CR is to test your ability to think in real-world terms about specific situations, using your everyday human reasoning and good old-fashioned comon sense.
by transmuting this task into abstractions, you'll gain nothing, and you'll instead be faced with a much less tractable task.

[RonPurewal]

in any case, do you have an actual question about this problem? if so, please clarify; i don't see one. thanks.

(if you do have a question, please avoid the use of symbols; e.g., i don't know what "<>" is supposed to mean.)

[PranavS897]

Hi Ron,
Help me understand the logic for this question.

the Argument states (in short) "The agency is unbiased. "
I would assume: "It is pure co-incidence that the people who passed the criteria for adoption knew someone from the agency. "

I find the statements below similar.
Argument's first statement:"It is true that eight of our last ten babies have been placed with parents who were personally acquainted with at least one of our staff members before initiating the adoption process"
and the correct answer choice: "Of those prospective parents who substantially surpassed the criteria for adoption, most were personally acquainted with agency staff before beginning the application process."

Answer choice (B) looks biased to me since of all the people who were prospective parents the ones who knew someone from agency got through. Aren't we supposed to go opposite to this stand?

[XiaoJ881]

OE of B:

(B) CORRECT. For the argument to establish lack of bias toward certain applicants, the proportion of "previously acquainted" people among those applicants chosen for placement must reflect the corresponding proportion among all applicants. In other words, if eight out of the ten parents actually chosen were personally acquainted with the staff, then a similar majority of all applicants should have been similarly acquainted with the staff. Alternatively, use the negation test. If this statement is false, then the majority of qualified applicants were in fact unacquainted with agency staff – a situation in which the placement of eight of ten babies with personally acquainted applicants is a clear signal of bias. Since the negation of this statement defeats the argument, the original statement must be assumed.

This explanation made a weird assumption that the selection process actually took staff acquaintance into consideration. It can totally be a random (thus unbiased/fair) process chose the only 8 staff acquainted families among 9000s qualified applicants.

Based on other answer choices, I'd say this is a wrong question. The author had the wrong assumption in mind when creating this question.

[KenH482]

Hey all,
Here is my understanding and I think it makes sense to me -

Fact: Majority (80%) of the successful parents are acquainted with the staff.
Conclusion: This is NOT a bias.

Why?
Assumption: Because majority of the qualified applicants are acquainted with the staff anyway.

So What?
The success rate is at fair share of the acquaintance, meaning it's not biased.

Negate?
What if few qualified applicants know the staff but 80% of the successful parents know the staff?

For example, there 100 applicants who all surpass the criteria apply for babies. Only 8 of the applicants know the staff. But the final result shows 8 out 8 acquitants (100%) succeed but 2 out of 92 non-acquitants (<5%) succeed. The ratio is so "unfair" that the selection is likely to be biased.

Make sense to everyone?

[LimeiC714]

Hi instructors:
After seen all discussion above, I still feel confusion about choice B. If it's were strengthen/strong question, I would totally agree with B, but it's a assumption, which must be true if claim is valid.
but in this example: among last 10 parents who succeed in applying, 8 of them are over 40 years old. you can't conclude that they take age into consideration, because it's possible that ages bring some factors such as wealth, knowledge, social position to influence decisions. we don't need the situation that most of the applicants have to be over 40 years old. If I negative the choiceB, I only can't improve the claim, but the claim doesn't have to be wrong. since the ten babis in research are chosed by random, it's not 8 parents in every parents qulified are acquainted with staff, the coincidence between acquaintance and succeed rate possible exist since the sample is too small to represent overall figure. I feel like choice B is support the claim but not assumption of the claim.
I kind of feel like I am thinking too much, but can't get the thinking out of my mind .

[RonPurewal]

personal familiarity is not a fundamentally random demographic quality like age, so that's not a great analogy.

more importantly, two things:

• remember, the WRONG answers to these problems are COMPLETELY WRONG.
on this kind of problem, the WRONG answers won't just be "not quite necessary"—either they'll be irrelevant, or they'll actively work against the argument.
so... you should NEVER have to think about these situations in such minute detail. there's no benefit in doing so, since all the wrong answers will be wrong for MAJOR reasons; furthermore—as you can see here—you might end up nit-picking tiny minutiae so much that you convince yourself to eliminate the RIGHT answer.

• ...and, you can't argue against a choice unless you're prepared to argue FOR ANOTHER choice. so, which answer choice do you think IS correct here?

[niksdoon]

I chose option A on basis that agency's decisions have been guided solely by the best interests of the children. If placements of babies with parents who were previously acquainted with its staff have, in general, been more successful than those with parents unacquainted with the staff. then such acquaintance placements are in best interest of children and hence weaken the agency's claim. What I am doing wrong here? Please help.

Thanks

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

You write that you chose answer A on the basis that 'the agency's decisions have been guided solely by the best interests of the children'. But that's what the agency itself is claiming: it's the conclusion of the agency's argument. We want to be careful that we don't take that as a fact; it's what the agency is trying to defend.

With that in mind, we can check if answer A is and assumption, that is, it's an unstated premise that we need for the argument to work.

At this point we can see that if "The agency's prior placements of babies with parents who were previously acquainted with its staff have not, in general, been more successful than those with parents unacquainted with the staff." then it looks strongly like favoritism that that 8 out of the last 10 babies have been adopted by people personally acquainted with staff members; thus the agency is not working in the best interests of the children.

Therefore answer A actually weakens the argument and so can't be an assumption.

Check out chapter 4 of the CR strategy guide.

[Ravi Kant]

Consider option D:
D) most prospective parents who apply to adopt babies do not meet the agency's criteria for adoption.

negate this: Very few or none of the parents who apply to adopt babies do not meet the agency's criteria===> this means that almost all of them meet the criteria still 8 out of 10 have been selected from acquaintances, is not it favoritism?

Please explain where I am wrong? although I could understand why B is correct I am unable to eliminate D.

[Chelsey Cooley]

Consider option D:
D) most prospective parents who apply to adopt babies do not meet the agency's criteria for adoption.

negate this: Very few or none of the parents who apply to adopt babies do not meet the agency's criteria===> this means that almost all of them meet the criteria still 8 out of 10 have been selected from acquaintances, is not it favoritism?

Please explain where I am wrong? although I could understand why B is correct I am unable to eliminate D.

There are two issues with this. One - be careful how you negate the answer choice! It's tricky to negate sentences that include logical words like 'most'.

Think about it this way:

A: You ate most of the cookies.
B: That's a lie. I only ate 9 of the 20 cookies.

If 'most' is wrong, then it could still be the case that almost half of the parents don't meet the criteria. It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone (or almost everyone) meets the criteria!

The second issue is this. If something is an assumption, when you negate it, the argument will no longer make logical sense. But even if most of the parents meet the criteria, the agency's argument against favoritism still makes perfect sense! After all, they claim that the acquaintances didn't just meet the criteria, they 'far surpassed' the criteria. So, sure, maybe most people met the criteria. But the agency can still claim they aren't playing favorites, because they didn't just pick parents who were good enough, they picked ones who were REALLY good.