Adoption agency representative: It is true that eight of our last ten

here is OE

(1) Identify the Question Type
The word "assumption" in the question stem indicates that this is a Find the Assumption question.

(2) Deconstruct the Argument
According to the argument, the adoption agency has awarded the majority of its recent placements to parents who were personally acquainted with agency staff. The argument denies that this discrepancy is a sign of favoritism toward certain applicants, on the grounds that all ten placements were made with parents who surpassed the agency's (and the law's) criteria for adoption.

(3) State the Goal
On Find the Assumption questions, we're looking for something that the author must believe to be true in order to draw the given conclusion. The argument concludes that the agency did not engage in favoritism because all of the chosen parents surpassed the adoption criteria. However, the argument is also assuming that, among all well-qualified applicants, there was no favoritism toward individuals who were personally acquainted with the agency staff.

For example, suppose there were 100 fully qualified families and only 8 of them were personally acquainted with the staff; those 8 happened to be chosen, while only 2 of 92 qualified applicants who were not acquainted with staff were chosen. If that were true, it would undermine the author's claim that the agency did not show any favoritism. The author must be assuming that this is NOT the case.

(4) Work from Wrong to Right

(A) The argument is concerned only with whether a bias toward personally acquainted applicants is present or absent; it is not concerned with whether such a bias may, in fact, lead to placements that are more successful in the long term.

(B) CORRECT. For the argument to establish lack of bias toward certain applicants, the proportion of "previously acquainted" people among those applicants chosen for placement must reflect the corresponding proportion among all applicants. In other words, if eight out of the ten parents actually chosen were personally acquainted with the staff, then a similar majority of all applicants should have been similarly acquainted with the staff. Alternatively, use the negation test. If this statement is false, then the majority of qualified applicants were in fact unacquainted with agency staff – a situation in which the placement of eight of ten babies with personally acquainted applicants is a clear signal of bias. Since the negation of this statement defeats the argument, the original statement must be assumed.

(C) The argument is concerned only with determining whether a bias is demonstrated by the agency's ten most recent placements; it does not involve the idea of whether those placements were made at a typical rate.

(D) Applicants who do not meet the criteria are irrelevant; the argument is concerned with determining whether a bias exists among fully qualified applicants. Therefore, the relative proportion of unqualified candidates among all applicants does not affect the argument.

(E) Although all ten of the agency's most recent placements may indeed have been placed with parents who "far surpassed" the criteria, there is nothing in the argument to suggest that all successful applicants must substantially surpass those criteria (as opposed to simply meeting or fulfilling them).