#14 - Forty to 60 percent of students report

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Flaw in the Reasoning. The correct answer choice is (E).

Answer choice (A):

Answer choice (B):

Answer choice (C):

Answer choice (D):

Answer choice (E): This is the correct answer choice.

[ChicaRosa]

I was stuck between A and E and ended up choosing the wrong answer. How is E correct and not A?

I thought it was A because the stimulus mentions surveys but is it wrong because it doesn't mention how the survey responses influence the results?

Is answer choice E saying that the argument concludes the causal connection (plagiarism and business misconduct) with association (undergrad and graduate students)?

Thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

Hey there Chica, you are right to be concerned about the accuracy of the responses in any survey. We always must be on guard for inaccurate data, either because respondents lied or didn't remember correctly, or even because they misunderstood what they were being asked. But think about it in this context, in this survey. Whose answers are we worried about?

The folks that said they plagiarized at least once probably were neither lying nor remembering incorrectly. It would be a bit surprising if folks who had never done that now claimed that they had, right? It's the flip side that we have to worry about - there may be folks who claimed that they had never done so, even though they had, either because they forgot or, despite it being an anonymous survey, they were ashamed or afraid to admit guilt. If that happened, then the plagiarism numbers would be even higher!

Now, does that matter? Our conclusion is that reducing plagiarism would reduce professional misconduct. This is solely based on the correlation between those two things. That's a classic causal flaw. It doesn't matter if we had 92% of folks saying they did it or if only 2% say so, because the problem isn't about the survey. It's about that causal claim based only on a correlation. The survey is essentially irrelevant for the purpose of attacking that conclusion. That's why E, the causal answer, is much better than A, the survey answer.

I hope that helps!