If participation in the honors creative writing class were limited to

KAPLAN OFFICIAL EXPLANATION:

E

The argument here is that eliminating undergraduates who did not receive a B+ or better in composition will reduce the failure rate in the honors class. The assumption must be that undergraduates who did not receive a B+ or better in composition have previously been the ones responsible for the failure rate, and are expected to continue to be responsible if they're allowed in the class. In other words, graduate students and other undergraduates have previously failed less frequently than undergraduates who did not receive a B+ or better in composition. So, to strengthen the conclusion that eliminating the non-B+ students will drive the failure rate down, we need a choice that confirms that the non-B+ students were in fact failing at a proportionally higher rate tharrthe others in the class. This is precisely what (E) does.

(A) seems tempting, but is irrelevant. The passage speaks only of eliminating undergraduates. Graduate students would still be allowed to take the course regardless of their composition grade. Whether or not the honors class is overcrowded in (B) is out of scope; reducing the failure rate, not overcrowding, is the focus of the stimulus. Similarly, (C) tells us nothing about the failure rate in the course. And (D) is wrong because the argument concerns a possible decline in the failure rate after non-B+ students are eliminated, not a decline in the absolute number of failures prior to the elimination of non-B+ students.

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