PrepTest 154, Section 2, Question 14
Superintendent: Within the school district overall, 11 percent(38 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the superintendent's(6 more words not shown)
- Auses evidence that(6 more words not shown)
- Buses the key(15 more words not shown)
- Cgeneralizes from a(12 more words not shown)
- Dinfers a specific(13 more words not shown)
- Econtains a premise(7 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Maybe the students who get internships were less likely to drop out in the first place.
The numbers are striking: 11 percent of students in the district drop out, compared with 1 percent of those in work internships.
But what determines which students participate? Perhaps students already committed to finishing school are especially likely to seek internships. Maybe they have more support at home or families with the resources to help them find those opportunities.
Those are possible explanations, not facts we've learned about the students. They matter because they could produce the pattern without the internship itself changing anyone's chance of dropping out. A group with a low dropout rate might have had that low risk before the program began.
What we’re looking for
The superintendent instead concludes that participation decreases the risk. That's the step we should challenge for this flaw question. The evidence connects internships with fewer dropouts; it doesn't yet tell us whether the internship causes that difference. We need an answer that allows another factor to explain why these students are both more likely to participate and less likely to leave school.
Working the answers
- A
These statistics can be checked. Someone could investigate school records and determine how many students participated and how many dropped out. The problem isn't evidence that is impossible to test. It's that even accurate figures leave open more than one explanation.
- B
'Student' refers to someone attending the schools in both the evidence and the conclusion. The internship group is a subset of the district's students, but that doesn't change the meaning of the word. The argument's mistake is in explaining the difference between groups.
- C
We aren't given one student who had an internship and stayed in school. We're given a statistic for the internship participants as a group. An argument about one successful student would have a different problem from the causal inference being made here.
- DCorrect
The superintendent treats the relationship between internship participation and low dropout rates as evidence that participation causes the lower rate. But another factor, such as students' existing commitment to education or support at home, could help explain both. The observed difference doesn't isolate the internship's effect.
- E
The statistical premise doesn't simply assume that internships reduce dropout risk. We could accept the 11 percent and 1 percent figures while rejecting that explanation of them. That's why the argument isn't just repeating its conclusion as a reason: it offers independent evidence, but asks that evidence to establish more than it does.
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