gmatexam439 wrote:
Hello mikemcgarry,
Can you please throw some light as to why option "A" is not correct and why "C" is correct?
My understanding of option A: There are 100 CEOs with sales exp and 1000 with marketing exp. 30% of 100=30 and 20% of 1000=200.
Clearly 200>30. This is option "A" for me. How can "A" be wrong? For comparison we ought to have a solid proof and not just %.
My understanding of option "C": If greater number of CEOs with sales exp are required to transform a plan than the comparison is wrong. Also if greater number of CEOs with sales exp are not required to transform a plan, then also we can't say anything since the premise gives us % and not numbers.
I mean to say is we can't say anything without numbers, right?
Please throw some light on this.
Awaiting your quick response
Regards
Dear
gmatexam439I'm happy to respond.
First of all, this is a
low-quality question. You will not necessarily get as much from diving into an analysis of a low-quality question. For the official questions and other high-quality questions, it's well worthwhile to dive deep in, but not so with the poor questions.
If the groups are two different sizes then in general, percents would be the correct way to compare the success rates.
It's true that if one group were in the hundreds and the other group were only single digit, then there would be so much uncertainty in the smaller percent that it wouldn't make sense to compare them (e.g. if one out of 5 CEO’s with prior Marketing experience have successfully transformed her company's strategy, that's 20%, but if one more or one fewer did so, the percentage would be quite different!)
Yes, that's true, but think about this realistically. Think about how the prompt is framed.
"
Most CEO’s have either sales or marketing experience prior to becoming the CEO. Data shows that, over the past decade, . . . "
We don't know the exact context, but the implication is that we are discussing either the whole of the global economy or an extremely large economy (the US, the EU, etc.) Of course, a high quality question would make clear the exact economy under evaluation. We are talking about large numbers: for example, there are over 27M businesses in the US. The prompt says "
most" are in these two categories--perhaps there's a small number with other backgrounds, such as engineering, but "
most" implies two gigantic portions of this large economy. We don't know how the two sizes compare, but if this is in the US, they will both be numbers in the millions. We simply are not going to run into the mathematical problems that you are anticipating. The percents in each category will be meaningful rates, and it makes sense to compare these rates.
Choice (C) does ask a more pertinent question: "
Whether a greater percentage of CEO’s with Sales experience were required to transform the strategy of a company than the percentage of marketing CEO’s."
Transforming the strategy of a company is not a good thing to do if the company operating perfectly fine with its current strategy. One of the first rules of business world is:
don't fix what's not broken. It is the difference in percentages a matter of the skill sets of the two kinds of CEOs, or does it have to do with the kinds of companies and kinds of business situations that the two kinds of CEOs tend to inherit when they take the helm?
Does all this make sense?
Mike
close
13 Jun 2017, 02:05
