#11 - A rise in the percentage of all 18 year olds who were

[curiosity]

Why is C the correct answer for this question? And would B have more merit if it said "most" instead of "many"? Are we supposed to assume that "many" effectively = "some"?

Thanks!

[Luke Haqq]

Hi curiosity,

Consider the argument if we assume (C) is true. If the proportion of recruitments that were high school graduates rose sharply between 1980-1986, this would call into question the argument's conclusion that the rise in the percentage of 18-year-olds recruited depended on the rise in high school dropouts. Rather, if answer (C) were true, many of the recruitments would in fact be graduates.

(B) Might be marginally better if it said "most" as you suggest. And you're right to note that we don't necessarily know the degree of difference between "many" and "some" (or they could be equivalent). But this wouldn't be sufficient to make (B) better than (C)--even if most of the high technology required a high school education it doesn't address the conclusion, which is about the dependence recruitment rates have on the rates of high school dropouts.

Make sense?

[curiosity]

Thank you. That makes sense, but I'm still confused about how "rising sharply" means that the percentage of high school graduates among 18 year-olds outweighed the percentage of high school drop outs that the republic recruited. Basically, couldn't they have rose sharply from 5% to 20%, but yet the recruitment rates for 18 year olds STILL "depend substantially on recruitment rates for high school dropouts"?

[Emily Haney-Caron]

Hi curiosity,

Keep in mind that we don't know anything about what percentage of 18-year-olds end up recruited. It could be a very small proportion, which would mean that even if MOST of the 18-year-olds in the country dropped out of high school, it would still be possible that ALL of the 18-year-olds recruited had graduated. Answer choice C is getting at just that idea; it shows that the percentage of recruited 18-year-olds who were high school graduates went up significantly, indicating that high school graduates could have made up the majority of the recruitment increase.

I hope that helps!

[Johnclem]

Hi powerscore,
I had a bit of trouble with this one. When I initially read the stimulus I was expecting for the author to make a causal claim from a correlation . However, when I read it again , I felt there was a conditional realationship in the conclusion, and changed my method of attacking the argument from the 5 causal method to "rejecting or attacking the necessary condition. Here is how I approached this question.. please let me know if my method is correct .

1) an increase in the % of recruits CORRELATES with an increase in the % of drop outs.

C: recuirtment rates --> high school drop outs

My thoughts before hitting the answer choices : arugument is weak for at least 2 reasons : 1) the correlation doesn't translate into a definitive claim. Those increases could have just been luck . 2) percentages don't really tell us anything about actual recruitment numbers. We could recruit 100% of the drop outs . But what if in reality there were only 1 drop out?

A) wrong : this could mean the graduates changed from 1 hire to 2 hire . And the rest of the hires were from the drop outs .

B) wrong : this could mean 1 or two techs . Maybe they hired only 2 graduates to take care of this .

c) YES! This shows us a higher percentage of graduates being recruited , thereby attacking the necessary condition of the argument . And also I think if we take this increase into consideration it also weakens the data found in correlation. The increase of the high school drop percentage could mean less students are dropping out .?

D) wrong : being encouraged doesn't mean they won't hire drop outs.


E) wrong: this is very similar to A - that increase in % could mean from 2% to 5%. And we could get a greater percentage of recruits from drop outs.


Thanks
John

[Adam Tyson]

John, your analysis looks great to me! I agree that this is not causal, but more like conditional, with "depends on" indicating a necessary condition.

You said you had some trouble with it, though, so what troubled you? There is real value to studying any question that gave you a challenge, even if you ended up getting the right answer. We want to diagnose those issues so that you can get to the right analysis and answer more efficiently and confidently, which will also translate to faster performance and more time available to tackle other, more difficult questions.

If you're of a mind to do so, share with us what the trouble was, and let's see if we can help you avoid that trouble in the future.

Meanwhile, good job, keep it up!

[LSAT2018]

Would it be possible to identify that because the stimulus is only concerned with percentages/rates for recruitment and high school drop-outs, the answers (C) and (E) are only contenders because they also refer to percentages, while (A) refers to numbers and (B), (D) are irrelevant?

[Adam Tyson]

I think that's a great way to quickly and efficiently narrow down the contenders, LSAT2018, and that is essentially how I did it myself. A is about numbers - I need an answer about percentages or proportions. B and D are irrelevant - I want to know about recruitment and proportions. That gets me down to C and E. My first reaction to C was "uh, what...I don't know, maybe, moving on." At answer E I saw proportions, but then the stuff about two years of college seemed irrelevant, and in any event it told me nothing about changes in the percentage of dropouts recruited. Okay, so you used to have 2% of your recruits with two years of college, and now it's up to 3% - what does that tell me about the dropouts? Nada.

Okay, I'll pick C, because the others are all wrong. Done

Then, after I was done, and the test was over and I was cracking open a beer and ordering some chili cheese fries, I looked at C more closely and actually thought about it. I started imagining numbers. They used to recruit 10% of all 18-year-olds, now they recruit 12%. During the same time the dropout rate went up from 2% to 3%. Does this mean that the extra recruits had to come from the extra dropouts? Not at all! Lousy argument! Heck, for all we know, they never recruit dropouts. What if the extra recruits all came from the graduates? This argument is no better than if they had said that the percentage of grocery bills spent on fresh fruits went up during that time period, so military recruiting is dependent in some way on people buying apples! Bunch of nonsense. Now where are my fries?

Good work on sorting the answers here! That's the way to cut through the noise and get to the right answer with no muss and no fuss.