Most of the students who took spanish 101 at rhe university last semes

Most of the students who took Spanish 101 at the University last semester attended every class. However, each student who received a grade lower than B minus missed at least one class session.

What does the para tell us?
Most of the students who took Spanish 101 at the University last semester attended every class.: It also means that only few missed one or more classes.
each student who received a grade lower than B minus missed at least one class session.: This means no one who attended all classes got less than B-

There is nothing more to the para, so do not get confused in the groups. We can talk of one group :-
1) Below B- : Missed at least one class

Which one of the following statements about the students who took Spanish 101 at the university last semester can be properly inferred from the information above?

(A) At least some of the students who received a grade of A minus or higher attended every class session.
That is nowhere mentioned. As I said, be careful with the groups we are looking at. We know only about one group: Below B-.
It may be possible that very few got A- or higher and these were the brainy ones who missed one class or more and still got A+. Nothing has been told about this group.
It could be that MOST of the class got a B and these included everyone who attended all classes.

(B) Most, if not all, of the students who missed at least one class session received a grade lower than B
Do not get confused in the two groups, namely group X of students who got less than B- and group Y of students who missed at least one class.
Remember Venn Diagram. X is subset of Y, but Y may have much more than the group X.
May be ONLY one got B-, and the remaining of group Y got A.

(C) Most of the students received a grade higher B minus.
We could say B- and higher, but not higher than B-. may be all those attended all classes got B-, and remaining who missed at least one class got less than B-.
What do we have here?: No one got a grade higher than b-.

(D) At least one student who received a grade of B minus or higher missed one or more class sessions.
We got a situation opposite of this in option C.

(E) More than half of the students received a grade of B minus or higher.
Now, this follows our thought process. We did speak of this in C.
Only few students missed one class or more, so let us take the worst case where all of Y group in option B get a grade less than B-. That is, X=Y.
So, even in the worst case scenario, remaining would have got a B- or higher, and we know that most of the students belong to this 'remaining' group.
MOST means MORE than half.
CORRECT


E

I ended choosing up A and got it wrong. Have given my analysis above about arriving at E.
As far why A is NOT the correct choice... the answer would be both A and E are correct and E is more correct. (if you choose A, same question can be asked about E- what wrong with E)...
But still to have concrete answer, we cant deny possibility that people who attended every class got only a B grade or at max B plus, we can't infer from given information about whether they got A minus or higher.
Hence E stands out.

Hope this helps.

GMATNinja

I dont understand this one, most of the students means at least 51%, fine, but we don't know, as E is saying, that more than half received grade B minus or higher.

What if most of the students represented 90%. Then it would mean that 90% of the students attended the class, and 10% didn't. So E would be wrong as it says : "+50% of the students received a grade of B- or higher". Because only the 10% who missed the class would have received a B - or lower. Does that mean that among the 90% who attended the class, no one received B- or lower ? No, but I don't think we can infer E nonetheless

While B says : most, if not all of the students who missed at least one class received a grade lower than B -. This is exactly what we have in the argument : However, each student who received a grade lower than B minus missed at least one class session.

So should be B IMO, what do you guys think ?

This is a nasty, nasty question, but (E) is indeed the correct answer.

What we really have here is a two-way overlapping sets problem -- and it's honestly a bit of a stretch to imagine that a question like this would show up on the GMAT. If you do come across something like this, be wary of whether it's really worth your time to solve it through, or whether that time is better spent on a different question.

That being said, let's go through (B) and (E):

Out of all of the students in the class, fewer than half missed at least one class. This is the subset of the class that we care about in evaluating (B).

Out of this subset, the students fall into one of two categories: either they received a grade below a B minus, or they received a grade equal to/higher than a B minus.

Can we really determine which of these two categories this subset of students falls into?

Nope, we can't -- as long as the two categories add up to less than 50% of the total class, the conditions of the prompt are met. Perhaps most of the non-perfect-attendance students got A's and B's, or perhaps most of them got C's and below.

Compare that to (E):

(E) asks us to think about another subset of students: those who got a B minus or higher.

These students can fall into one of two categories: either they attended every class, or they didn't.

Let's consider the ones who attended every class: we KNOW that more than half of the students overall attended every class. In addition, we KNOW that the students with grades below a B minus DIDN'T attend every class. That means that all of the students who attended every class MUST have gotten a B minus or higher -- in other words, more than half of the class got a B minus or higher.

We can infer (E), and that is the correct answer.

I hope that helps!

The question says that the students who get a score of B- or lower don't attend every class but the option 'E' says that every student who didn't attend the class scored B- or lower. This seems flawed. Thoughts?

Take another look at (E):


(E) doesn't say that "every student who didn't attend the class scored B- or lower." It's talking about a different subset of students -- the students who got good grades. What do we know about these students?

I'll steal from our previous post. These students can fall into one of two categories: either these high-grade students attended every class, or they didn't.

Let's consider the ones who attended every class: we KNOW that more than half of the students overall attended every class. In addition, we KNOW that the students with grades below a B minus DIDN'T attend every class. That means that all of the students who attended every class MUST have gotten a B minus or higher -- in other words, more than half of the class got a B minus or higher.

We can infer (E), and that is the correct answer.

I hope that helps!

Most of the students who took Spanish 101 at the University last semester attended every class. However, each student who received a grade lower than B minus missed at least one class session.

Which one of the following statements about the students who took Spanish 101 at the university last semester can be properly inferred from the information above?

(A) At least some of the students who received a grade of A minus or higher attended every class session. - WRONG. A- or A or A all are possible but since it remains to be seen what grading system is applicable here. Only then clarity is there.

(B) Most, if not all, of the students who missed at least one class session received a grade lower than B - WRONG. It can be possible that there's another grade between B and B-. Also, another possibility is that only some(few) received grade lower than B and most of among them received higher than B. We are sure that B- ones have missed at least one class session but the reverse scenario is not equally possible i.e. those who missed at least class received lower than B-.

(C) Most of the students received a grade higher B minus. - WRONG. Yes and not both are possible. No case is such that a few receive more than B- and most receive B- or lower.

(D) At least one student who received a grade of B minus or higher missed one or more class sessions. - WRONG. This is interesting. It's like option B only. Reverse case scenario.

(E) More than half of the students received a grade of B minus or higher. - CORRECT. Those who didn't miss even a single class got B- or higher.

Got it correct but took more than 4 min .
First of all, we are not sure what grading system it is using here in the passage, so whenever a grading other than B- is discussed in a choice we need to be careful about that that we need not waste much time on it.

Answer E.