#14 - For one academic year all the students at a high

[reop6780]

The correct answer is C.

I just did not understand how answer C resolves discrepancy of the stimuli.

How does answer C explain that those who studied less made higher grades than those who spent most time studying?

It appears to merely touch only one side of discrepancy that supports the hypothesis that the more you study, the better your grade is.

Thank you

[BethRibet]

Hi Reop,

Thanks for writing. Some of the students who got higher grades didn't study as much -- that's the primary fact provoking uncertainty in this stimulus. So you might imagine who those students could be -- for instance, those who have a natural aptitude for test-taking. Not all students need as much time to do well. So the fact that some get good grades with less effort than others, fits the fact that students have different levels of pre-existing ability and intelligence. But the hypothesis tests whether studying improves grades for each student, compared to how that student would do if s/he did not study, or studied less.

C helps explain, because rather than comparing different students (who made need more or less studying based on different abilities), it compares each student's performance based on how *that* student will do if s/he studies more or less.

Hope that helps!

Beth

[eober]

Hi,

In this question answer choice seems to repeat the hypothesis but how does it help explain the conclusion researcher drew from the observation in which they saw most time studying did not correlate with high grades as compared to ones who did not study. Does that mean we are not concerned with the ones who studied less? From the hypothesis I assumed that if studying more increased chances of a higher grade then the ones who study little would not earn as high grades.

Could you just clarify this question? Thank you so much!

[Robert Carroll]

eober,

The paradox in the stimulus depends on your thinking that the students start out on equal footing. If so, then if some study less but still get better grades, then it doesn't seem like studying more leads to higher grades. Once you rid yourself of the presumption that they must start on equal footing, the paradox can be avoided. If some students would get a grade of B without studying, whereas some would get a grade of D without studying, imagine that the person with the B grade studies a little and gets an A, whereas the person with the D grade studies a lot and gets a B. The first person studied less but ended up with a better grade - but studying helped both people!

Answer choice (C) is consistent with this explanation. Studying helped everyone, so that the hypothesis "that studying more increased a student’s chances of earning a higher grade" is true; the more you study, the better the grade. The other side of the paradox, "it turned out that the students who spent the most time studying did not earn grades as high as did many students who studied less," is explained by not everyone starting at the same competence level. Thus, studying helped a given student get a better grade than he or she would have received, while not necessarily getting a better grade than someone who studied less.

Robert Carroll

[lawana]

what type of question does the stem fall under?
I was confused between main point or strengthen.
I decided to answer it as main point, and I was between A and C.
could you please explain why A isn't good?

thank you!

[James Finch]

Hi Lawana,

This is actually a Resolve the Paradox question, where a seeming paradox between the premises, or occasionally between premises and conclusion, is presented and must be resolved by inserting another premise into the argument. The way the correct answer will do this is as follows:

1. Contains a resolution that allows both seemingly conflicting sides of a paradox to be simultaneously true.

2. Explains how the paradox arose, giving a possible cause for the situation.

3. Deals with the stimulus's facts directly

Here, the paradox is that the students that studied the most didn't receive grades as high as "many" who didn't study as much, but the researchers still concluded that the study showed that studying more leads to higher grades. Underlying this paradox is the lack of like-to-like comparisons; the conclusion is stating that an individual student is more likely to get a better grade in a class by studying more, while the premise is comparing students of varying aptitudes and showing that across all students, the greatest study time did not result in the highest grades.

Answer choice (A) fails to resolve this paradox because it doesn't get to the origin of the paradox, which is whether an individual student improves their chance of getting a higher grade by studying more. Instead, we're still comparing across students, and in a similarly vague way as in the stimulus.

Answer choice (C) does resolve our paradox by showing that the individual student could improve their own grade by studying more than they did prior, which allows that some students studying less (but with natural aptitude in some subjects) could still have higher grades overall than students who studied more overall.

Hope this clears things up!

[1800-HELPME]

Hello,

Why is (E) wrong? Is it because understanding the course material better doesn’t necessarily mean that they will earn a higher grade? Doesn’t understanding the course material give you a higher chance of earning a high grade?

Thank you

[Malila Robinson]

Hi 1800-Helpme,
Yes, E is incorrect because it discusses understanding rather than grades. And while it is probably the case that the more you understand a subject the better you will do in the course, this answer doesn't necessarily say that. It says that they "understood the course material better than other students did." This raises the possibility that the other students didn't understand it at all, so to understand it better, the students who studied would only need to have a basic understanding. This might not result in higher grades.
Hope that helps,
-Malila

[jwheeler]

I had a similar thought process with regards to E. I narrowed it down to C & E, but ultimately chose wrong. My thought was: if you understand better, then you're more likely to make a higher grade (i.e. your chances of that happening are higher". I thought that since the stimulus referred to the chance of earning a higher grade, and not actually necessarily getting that higher grade, this would be the correct answer. Can you point out where my thinking went astray or how to avoid a similar trap in the future?

[Brook Miscoski]

jwheeler,

It's good to eliminate (E) because "understanding" is not the same as a grade. There are other grounds to eliminate E that are useful on all resolve/explain questions.
1. Eliminate choices that make the paradox harder to understand.
2. Eliminate choices that attack the factual scenario instead of explain it.

(E) says that the students who study the most understand the best. It is extremely difficult to reconcile that with them being regularly outperformed on grades, so this can't help to resolve the paradox. It just makes it harder to understand or challenges the stimulus's claim that the students who studied the most did not do as well as other students.