1.Top college graduates are having more difficulty demonstrating their superiority to prospective employers than did the top students of twenty years ago when an honors degree was distinction enough. Today’s employers are less impressed with the honors degree. Twenty years ago no more than 10 percent of a given class graduated with honors. Today, however, because of grade inflation, the honors degree goes to more than 50 percent of a graduating class. Therefore, to restore confidence in the degrees they award, colleges must take steps to control grade inflation.
Which one of the following is an assumption that, if true, would support the conclusion in the passage?
(A) Today’s students are not higher achievers than the students of twenty years ago.
(B) Awarding too many honors degrees causes colleges to inflate grades.
(C) Today’s employers rely on honors ranking in making their hiring decisions.
(D) It is not easy for students with low grades to obtain jobs.
(E) Colleges must make employers aware of the criteria used to determine who receives an honor degree.

Pls explain to me,too . Thanks in advance.
_________________

cool

IMO A

students today are no better than the students in the past

What is wrong with B?

Javed.

Cheers!

As i've stated before, these post are only useful if individuals will contribute some type of explanation with their posts, not just A.B.C, etc.

The way the question stem is; "Which one of the following is an assumption that, if true, would support the conclusion in the passage?"

I was leaning towards this being a justify the conclusion, but i'm fairly confident that this is an assumption question.

Want to concentrate on two things with this type of question:
(*) The correct answer to an assumption question is a statement the author must believe in order for the conclusion to make sense.

(*) Because the statement must be somthing the author believed when forming the argument, assumption answer choices cannot contain extranerous information.

Now, on to the possible answers:
D) "It is not easy for students with low grades to obtain jobs." You can cross this off your list immediately, as you see no mention of LOW GRADES in the passage.

E) "Colleges must make employers aware of the criteria used to determine who receives an honor degree". Again, this can be crossed off you list, as you see no mention what-so-ever about the "criteria" in the passage.

C) "Today’s employers rely on honors ranking in making their hiring decisions". Nope, cross this one off as well. I'll tell you why for two reasons.

(1) Directly in the passage you see "Today's employers are less impressed with the honors degree", which is exactly the reverse of our "possible" answer.
(2) Take the contrapositive of the possible answer choice and it's turned into "Today's employers DO NOT rely on honors ranking in making their hiring decision". By doing this you see that the argument is not weakened in any form.

Now we are left with A and B... hmmm, which it seems about half the responses are A while the other half are B.

I'm sorry but I feel that A is wrong:
(A)"Today’s students are not higher achievers than the students of twenty years ago."
-Unless I miss read the passage I see NO MENTION of higher achievers. Even further, taking the contrapositive you get: "Today's students ARE high achiever than the students of twent years ago". And besides, no mention of grade inflation in this possible answer.

by P.O.E. i'm going with B.

Please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong.

Joe.

OA please

Very well explained apache

Javed.

Cheers!