Hey Salt, I'd be happy to! With MBT questions like this one, it's very important to study exactly what the stimulus is saying to make sure we're not picking an answer choice that is out of scope. The committee chairperson, in this case, says a lot of things, which we can boil down as follows:
1. If a new course is approved for next year, then a proposal for it has been received by the committee or by Dean Wilson. (This is an unless statement, but can be rewritten as a simple if...then statement as seen above.)
2. Dean Wilson only got one course proposal.
3. All of the proposals received by the committee have been for upper-level courses.
4. Beginning next year, all upper-level courses have prerequisites.
We can try and prephrase an answer here. Mine was: if a course received by the committee is approved, it will have at least one prerequisite. But truthfully, there's so many directions the correct answer can go in that we can't put too much stock in our prephrase (and sure enough, the correct answer doesn't match my prephrase. Yay!
)
An important point to remember is that we don't know any specifics about Wilson's course proposal. It could be an upper-level course, but it might not be, and this point factors into some of the answer choices.
A) We can't say this for sure. While we're told that all upper-level courses will have prerequisites, we know nothing about lower-level or mid-level courses at this school. There's a possibility that the course received by Wilson is a special lower-level course that requires a prerequisite.
B) Careful: we're told that the committee received multiple courses, but there's no guarantee that they will approve all of them. For example, say they received five proposals for upper-level courses, and they approved three. Let's say Wilson rejected his, so those three are the only approvals for new courses. Yes, it's true that all of the new courses are upper-level, but its not true that the committee approved all of their proposals.
C)
CORRECT. The key here is that Wilson received only one proposal. So if more than one is approved, and they can only come from either Wilson or the committee, that must mean that at least one came from the committee. Since they only received proposals for upper-level courses, and those must have prerequisites, it does follow that at least one of the approved courses in this instance carries a prerequisite.
D) The problem here is the second half: while it is possible that Wilson's submission is for an upper-level course, this answer makes a claim about ALL courses offered next year, whether new or not! This is a ridiculously broad statement; we can't make any determination about all courses offered at this school! This is a trap answer for students who are reading quickly and fail to notice that we're no longer talking about new courses specifically.
E) We can't know this. It could be the case that all new course proposals were rejected, including Wilson's and the committee's. Just because there are no new upper-level courses next year doesn't necessarily mean Wilson approved his: he could have also gotten an upper-level course and rejected it.
Hope this helps!
