Good Universities hire experienced professors to enhance student learn

Hi Ian,

I have a point here.

This argument have a hidden assumption that highly qualified professors do not-easy assessments. Which is what weaken by E. correct me if I am wrong.

The first sentence of the stem isn't written in English (it at least needs to say "improving" and not "improve"), so it's a bit hard to tell what it means, but as I read it, it says graduation rates improve when universities hire experienced profs. If that's a premise, it doesn't matter why that happens, or what kind of assignments those profs give -- whether the assignments are easy or hard, graduation rates still improve. So answer E isn't helpful here.

I see you are a tutor, so I'm sure you know better than me, but I think E is fine (problematic grammar and structural errors aside). Other answer choices had bigger issues, like actually denying premises altogether.

The conclusion of the argument is that the improvement in the graduation rate is NOT due to more experienced professors. Answer choice E confirms that even if the grading/tests were easier, that experienced professors may be the reason for it. Therefore, it weakens the conclusion, while affirming both premises.

Can you clarify why you don't think this weakens that argument?

It's clearly not a well-written or well-conceived question, so it's probably not worthwhile devoting a lot of time to it, but there's a distinction, at least in my mind, between the "easy assessments" mentioned in the stem, and the "lenient grading" mentioned in answer E. Maybe to the question designer, those mean the same thing, but to my reading they do not; a hard assignment might be graded leniently, and an easy assignment might be graded harshly. We can infer from the stem that when assignments are easy, students get better grades, but that doesn't help us when we read answer E, which only tells us about grading and not about assignment difficulty.

I suppose if you read the stem to mean "grades go up either because of good profs or because of easy assignments", and you read E to mean "good profs always give easy assignments", then you could infer that no matter what, when grades go up, assignments were easy. But if that's what we're meant to think, that contradicts a premise (the stem says good profs improve grades by 'enhancing student learning', not by giving easy assignments), so I didn't interpret E that way, because premises need to be true. And the stem proposes a binary distinction -- it's one thing or the other, not both -- and if we interpret E to mean experienced profs give easy assignments, we're assuming those two possibilities overlap. That is, the conclusion says "it's not the profs, it's the assignments", and if we want to weaken that, we want some reason to think "it is the profs, and it is not the assignments", but E says it's both the profs and the assignments, at least if you think "lenient grading" means "easy assignments". So E doesn't do what we want even if we interpret the question differently from how I was interpreting it.

Anyway, as with so many other prep company Verbal questions, you can often justify two answers or none of them, and it's always better to work from official questions which only ever have one unambiguously correct answer.

I must have missed this reply! Only just came across the notification in my email.

But yes, this all makes sense and agreed on all fronts. Thanks for following up!