Q3 - Acme Corporation offers unskilled workers

[mshinners]

Question Type:
Weaken

Stimulus Breakdown:
Acme promotes unskilled workers from within! The premise supporting this conclusion is that Pres. Garon started in a position requiring no skills.

Answer Anticipation:
There's a subtle term shift here between being unskilled and taking a job that requires no special skills. It's possible that Pres. Garon was highly skilled when she took that entry-level position; she just took it to get her start.

Correct answer:
(B)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) If anything, opposite. Another example of someone being promoted to upper management from an unskilled position would, if anything, strengthen this argument.

(B) Bingo. The company hires skilled workers (those who have specialized education) and makes them work unskilled positions to "learn the ropes". This answer points out that Pres. Garon might actually have been skilled all along, which would weaken the argument about promoting unskilled workers based on her example.

(C) Unwarranted comparison. This argument doesn't care about promoting from within vs. hiring from without. It cares about promoting unskilled workers from within.

(D) Out of scope. The amount of time it takes to get promoted doesn't speak to the existence of opportunities. Especially when dealing with a promotion to the top of the chain - earlier opportunities for advancement could have come much more quickly.

(E) Out of scope. The conclusion is about opportunities for advancement, not opportunities to make money right away.

Takeaway/Pattern: When an argument talks about requirements, that doesn’t preclude "extra". Here, the job required no specialized skills, but that doesn't rule out a person in that position having those skills (i.e., being overqualified).

#officialexplanation

[geverett]

Interested to hear about B. I picked it b/c of working from wrong to right, but I feel that this answer choice requires one of the bigger assumptions I can remember seeing in a correct answer choice.

[ohthatpatrick]

Great point. Strengthen/Weaken answers are tougher than those of other questions (for me), because they don't directly state their relevance to the argument.

It is up to us readers to apply common sense and judge what effect the answer has on the issues of the argument.

As you said, we can pretty reliably get to (B) by realizing that (A) and (C) strengthen. (D), we might argue, also mildly strengthens, since it rules out the possibility of something like what (B) is describing. (E) is definitely irrelevant.

So let me defend (B).

The argument was trying to prove that unskilled workers had excellent opportunities for advancement, and the only evidence provided was that the company's President once worked as an entry-level worker at Acme.

(B) suggests that Ms. Garon was not in fact some unskilled worker who continually proved her worth and climbed each rung from entry-level to president. Instead, it suggests that she was recruited from a fancy business school, and momentarily forced to work in a succession of entry level positions (presumably so that she would have some firsthand knowledge of her company's inner workings).

So citing her as an example of the company's "upward mobility" would seem disingenuous, since she was a highly educated worker who was brought in to be a manager, and her tenure in the entry-level position was just a short precursor to her "real" job.

Now, it was never actually said that Ms. Garon was one of these top business school grads, so I assume you're saying that's the big assumption.

If the answer said "Acme sometimes hires top grads ....", it would be pretty sketchy to assume Ms. Garon is one of those top grads. However, the answer does say "Acme regularly hires top grads ...". That makes it a more reasonable assumption for us to make.

I don't know if you ever seen the boilerplate language at the beginning of the LR section, but it says "you should not make assumptions that are by commonsense standards implausible, superfluous, or incompatible with the passage."

I think LSAC could argue that when we read (B) and think "oh, well then Ms. Garon might just be one of those highly skilled outside recruits" that this is not implausible, superfluous, or incompatible.

Note, that even believing she MIGHT be one of these top graduates is enough to cast doubt on the original argument (and "cast doubt" is equivalent to "weaken").

Sometimes, the correct answer to Strengthen and Weaken does not persuade us because it fails to prove or refute the original argument. However, the correct answer doesn't have to be that powerful an idea. It only has to make the argument more believable or less believable.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you were thinking/asking something beyond what I addressed.

[jinalee0615]

The argument the stimulus makes is that Ms. Garon is indicative of the fact that Acme Corp offers unskilled workers opportunities to advance. The assumption is that , because she was working an entry-level (unskilled) position, that she in fact is an unskilled worker.

Answer choice (B) annihilates this assumption. It says that, yes, the premise is true, Ms. Garon did work an unskilled position but that's not because she is an unskilled worker. It's the opposite -- she has all these desirable managerial qualities and is going through the motions before acquiring a management role.

Therefore, her situation is not representative of the fact that unskilled workers are given opportunities, and rather suggests the opposite.

- (A) and (C) both strengthen the argument.
- (D) attacks the premise of the argument core, rather than the assumption.
- (E) is a detail creep that's irrelevant to the argument core.

[jiangziou]

I am not sure about (B), because top graduates of business school may also be unskilled.

I understand "unskilled" as "no experience on the work". A top graduate of business school is not equal to work experience.

[mshinners]

I am not sure about (B), because top graduates of business school may also be unskilled.

I understand "unskilled" as "no experience on the work". A top graduate of business school is not equal to work experience.

That would also be a term shift - skills and experience are not the same thing. Someone with natural talents could be highly skilled but completely inexperienced.

Skilled labor is just labor that has skills. Those skills could be inherent or learned - in this case, the correct answer tells us that Pres. Garon learned her skills before she started.

[LolaC289]

As reviewing it, I think (B) is a good answer, which implies that Ms. Garon was already skilled when she started working at Acme. But I think (D) is attractive as well. As ohthatpatrick's great explanation seems to interpret skills as something related to "knowledge" or "intelligence" (top graduates), which I totally understand, I personally regard skills more related to "time" and "experience", which generally improves as time goes by. So when I saw (D) I thought it could be a good contender, because it took Ms. Garon more than 20 years to get where she's at, during that period, she practiced and learned, went from unskilled to skilled. I think this interpretation is also not implausible, superfluous or incompatible with common sense. Can someone please shed more light on why (B) is a better answer than (D)?

[Yit HanS103]

Hello,

I got this question wrong and I also don't see B being the answer. I did not like any of the answers but D was bit more convincing, since we know that sometimes there are not perfect answers.

CON: ACME offers unskilled workers (doesn't say what kind of workers or positions) opportunities for advancement
pre: the president who started at entry level with no skills ( to me no skill in the job, means he has no idea of the performance of the job)

choice B - I don't like that it says "before promoting them to management" nothing in the stimulus suggest that advancement =management. offer advancement to workers, could be like starting as security and get promoted to assistant.

choice D- Even though, I wasn't loving this answer. If I know that it took the president 20 years to hold that position then it weakens the stimulus. because stimulus says Acme offers advancement to workers, however if it takes 20 years of being at the job then there is nothing special about acme, since all other companies do the same. basically their "advancement" is not different than any other company.

[ohthatpatrick]

If someone got a job as an unskilled person when they were 18, fresh out of high school, and by the age of 38 they were President of the Company, we would call that typical?

I think that's a pretty remarkable story. There are a lot of people who can be in the same position for 10 / 20 years, or who may climb the ladder somewhat but not all the way from entry level to top of the pyramid.

I would not say that it's true of every company that in 20 years you can go from assembly line to President of the company. Do you think that EVER occurred at Toyota, Honda, Ford, etc.? Someone went from assembly line to President of the company?

So I can see (D) almost acting as a strengthener: it suggests that Ms. Garon is someone who had to slowly work her way up the ladder, potentially validating the assumption that she began as someone unskilled.

For (B) you were bothered by the idea that nothing in the stimulus says that advancement = management.

But you understand that the President of a company is a management position right? They don't have to tell us that. And the argument / answer choice isn't saying that all forms of advancement are into management positions.

But a promotion from assembly line (entry-level) to eventual president surely counts as advancement, and the argument is offering Ms. Garon as its only evidence of advancement.

So when (B) talks about hiring skilled b-school grads and putting them in entry-level positions before promoting them to management, it could very well be describing Ms. Garon.

Because of that, we aren't as comfortable with accepting her as solid evidence that this company offers UNSKILLED workers great chances to advance.

Hope this helps.

[JeremyK460]

Breakdown:
Support: The president of AC, Garon, started at an entry level position which required no special skills (assembly line worker).

Conclusion: Unskilled workers at AC have excellent opportunities for advancement.

Analysis:
The evidence and conclusion are talking about two different things: the evidence is about a position’s ‘qualities’ and the conclusion is about a person’s ‘qualities’. Breaking up the second premise into two premises made this distinction more visible to me:

Garon, now president, started at an entry level position.
Entry level positions require no special skills.

The entry level position’s ‘characteristics’ aren’t necessarily representative of who Garon is. She could’ve been a highly skilled prodigy for all I know. The argument believes Garon must’ve been unskilled; perhaps a position’s characteristics determine those of the worker.

Also, the argument uses a single success story to support a pretty strong value judgment: excellent opportunity. I’d say Garon’s example is support for the fact that the opportunity exists, but i’d hardly call it excellent! I’m only going off of one example; I know nothing else. The conclusion just seemed a little presumptuous.

Answer Choices:
(A) This is either opposite of what the question is asking for because it adds another achieved person to the list, or it does nothing but repeat the same idea already presented in the evidence. The president and vice president both started at these entry level jobs and worked their way up. This answer feels promising for the unskilled worker, assuming that the VP was an unskilled worker who worked his way through the ranks (rather than leaving for another company where he saw better advancement and then returning as president).

(B) Taking this in time, I selected it by POE. The review and the discussion so far has been awesome! Would love to talk about this question. Here’s my two-cents worth of logic! The answer is saying that AC generally hires top grads out of business school, where AC moves them around a bunch laterally before Acme moves these grads vertically (a company that hires me and moves me around in a succession of entry level positions, I interpret this as being moved around a bunch laterally). Whether I assume that these top grads are highly skilled or not skilled at all, the notion that Acme moves entry level workers around a bunch laterally before moving them vertically would still suck from an entry level worker’s perspective. So, by that token, it’s much harder to claim that Acme offers entry level workers excellent opportunities for advancement!

(C) AC will usually promote from within instead of hiring out. A comparative value judgment between AC and other companies isn’t indicated by the argument. Promoting from within seems pretty advantageous for any worker (skilled or unskilled) at the company. If I were an unskilled worker there, and I was told that the company promotes from within more often than hiring out, my chances of promotion increase just a bit. So, I looked at this as more supportive than antithetical.

(D) I’m not sure if this is good or bad?! I don’t think it’s all that bad to work at a company for 20 years before being promoted to president, especially since the author assumes she was an unskilled worker. This could be a tempting answer under the assumption that Garon was stuck at her entry level position for the entire 20 years. But even at that, even if Garon was stuck at her entry level position for 20 years and was suddenly promoted to president, how could I reasonably be like: “Wow, that really sucks for Garon”... I don’t think I could. The end result of being president justifies the means. She put her in time. She obviously deserves it if she’s been promoted president. Unless we live in a world where we would elect a president who is so wildly incompetent...Oh wait...

(E) This really sounds like a plus in terms of working an entry level job there. All in all, I don’t see how a comparison on the basis of highest pay for entry level positions between Acme and other companies would have an impact on the argument.

[GolddiggerF208]

As to (B) - does anyone explain "briefly"? How about the "rotation" only lasts for 1 month? (I know I make a huge assumption but "briefly" drives me crazy.)