RK84 wrote:
@Mike- In Option E, the steady increase could mean a 0.5 percentage point increase every year in the past 5 years with a base of say 10 students taking those courses out of 10,000 students in the entire country. It can be any random number. Now, these 10 students might be taking help from other sources than the math faculty of the country.
Hence it is difficult to deduce that it's the work done by math faculty of the country mentioned and to discard external factors. Option E as well looks flawed to me.
Dear
RK84,
My friend, I'm happy to respond.
You have put your finger on central issue about the GMAT CR that most students ignore.
The GMAT says: "no outside knowledge is needed" for the CR arguments. In other words, to answer this question, you shouldn't have to be an expert in the topic. It's not necessary, for example, to have read a book about math education in the USA or to have taken an education class about math skills. You don't need any of that expert knowledge. Any question that demands expert knowledge is not a true GMAT CR.
But, the deep mistake that students make is they assume that
all outside knowledge is irrelevant, that the GMAT CR existed in some magically sealed fantasy world in which anything can be true. That is a profound mistake that hurts students' performance on the CR.
Think about why the GMAT asks Critical Reasoning. Folks in the business world need to hear real-world arguments all the time, and they need to be able to evaluate those arguments in context. Business people need to have a gut sense of what is sensible or practical and what is not.
It is very helpful for GMAT CR to have what I would call the "background knowledge" of a business person. What motivate people in the real world? What drives particular markets? What kinds of people are likely to be for or against a particular issue? Having a general knowledge of the ambiance of the real business world would be enormously helpful on the GMAT CR.
In this problem, technically we don't know the country, but it certainly "feels" like the USA to me (these are debates that often rage in the US). I can't think of another major economic nation that has debates about why are math skills in our country so poor. To my knowledge, that's not a debate in India, in the Far East, or in most European nations. That's part of the background knowledge you should have. Thus, the idea of only 10,000 student is not realistic. I don't know whether it's 10^5 or 10^6 or 10^7, but clearly a large number of US students take calculus. Furthermore, more people take calculus now and, in fact, more people go to college now, than did fifty years ago. That's also an important real world fact to have in mind.
Here's a very important point. When someone in business or government in the real world publicly "
reports a steady increase," this means an increase big enough that other dispassionate observers would say, "yes, that's an increase." Real world institutions don't publicly announce something such as a "
steady increase," if it's only dribs and drabs of increase each year, such that any observer would laugh at calling this an increase! Institutions don't like to be embarrassed, so they are exceedingly careful and conservative about the claims they put forth in the world. All of these are real-world dynamics of which you should be aware.
You see, if you treat the GMAT CR as if it's taking place in a la-la fantasy land in which any bizarre or unreasonable thing could be true, then you will get them wrong time and time again. Among other things, the GMAT CR is a tool designed to assess how grounded your thought is in the real push and pull of the modern business world.
You can see more here:
GMAT Critical Reasoning and Outside KnowledgeDoes all this make sense, my friend? This is a subtle point, and many GMAT students are confused about this point. If you can master this, it will put you way ahead of so many others!!
Mike