#5 - Company policy: An employee of our company must be

[SherryZ]

Dec 2001 LSAT, Sect 1, LR, Q5:

I chose A, the correct answer choice. But when I confronted this question, I was distracted by D and it took me a while to make decision

My understanding of the stimulus is that any employee should be impartial, when they promote, fire or provide services to others, they should not treat family BETTER or WORSE just because they are his/her family members.

I don't understanding why D is wrong. Is it because this answer choice has nothing to do with family members?

Thank you very much!

---Sherry

[BethRibet]

Hi Sherry,

Thanks for the question.

The biggest weakness in answer choice D is that while the behavior described certainly seems unfair or unreasonable, there is not actually a clear indication that the issue is a manager being partial (i.e. biased, or preferential), generally or towards family members. For instance, it is not clear that this employee is being treated more harshly than others, only that the employee is not getting credit for his performance. Perhaps the manager in question treats everyone that way.

Answer choice D also has a timeframe -- that is within two years, and there is no information provided about how far back the employee's behavior should be relevant to current advancement prospects. Perhaps for instance, having a clean track record for 5 years is normally essential to getting a promotion.

Good luck!

Beth

[lilmissunshine]

Is answer choice (E) incorrect because it doesn't provide any information on the family member's performance compared to the other employee?

Many thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

You got it! The goal is to be impartial, and answer E gives no indication that the employee promoting a family member was not impartial because we don't why the family member got promoted over the other employee.

[Matt_JB]

I am having trouble with this question. Let me walk you through my logic and hopefully someone can help.

A and C appear, to me, to imply the a problem with in regards to the principle. Here’s why:

A. States that one is refusing to hire a sibling, even though they are more qualified. I understand that may prove to show a problem with being impartial, but not necessarily, it could be that they are simply not fit for the job, which happens all the time. I also do not consider this a stretch of an assumption, obviously other factors get taken into consideration when hiring an applicant. If 2 people were more qualified than a 3rd, but all were still badly below par, that is a good reason not to hire them that is still “impartial.”

C. My major problem with C has to do with the word NEVER. Never implies any situation, which would mean, even if the siblings should be fired, they would not be.

In both scenarios, you need to inject an assumption somewhere, because I know that is not a good idea in most cases, I ended up choosing D. Even though I felt it was not a strong answer, either.

Essentially, I was able to eliminate E and B right off the bat, but since, to me, both A and C required some assumption, I eliminated them as well.

Can someone explain to me where my logic is off?

[James Finch]

Hi Matt,

So you did well in eliminating answer choices (B) and (E). (D) is also a loser, as the stimulus principle deals with impartiality towards family members, not length of time from the last time non-family members has problems at work; the stimulus is irrelevant to (D)'s situation. (C) doesn't work because while it deals with family members, there is no cause given as to why one would fire them, so one has no reason to say that not firing them would violate the impartiality rule.

(A) works because, as a Most Strongly Supported question, rather than Must Be True, it doesn't have to be 100% certain, only likelier than all the other answer choices. Here, it is the bias against family members that is the implied cause for the effect of not hiring them, in spite of their greater qualifications than all other applicants; you are correct to note that we still don't know that, even being "more qualified" than other applicants, the family members meet the threshold of "qualified" or not, but it still makes it the likeliest answer, as they are the most qualified of the applicants for the job, and thus the best candidates for the position.

Hope this clears things up!