One of the greatest problems facing Engineering practitioners today,

True & sorry.
A: absorbing, learning and remaining are // .
B. absorbing, learning and to remain are not //
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Now it make sense why A is the right one. D definitely is fragment, but i could not have done much without the complete question.

I was still debating between B and A though.

I also believe the same. B looks correct. Someone plz explain the choice A.

A looks okay:

One of the greatest problems facing Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is remaining empathetic to the needs of patients in the face of all the rigorous training

One of the greatest problems facing Engineering practitioners today
apart from:
absorbing <%#%#$>
Is:
remaining <%$%#$>

"Gerund-Gerund" looks parallel!!!

Answer: A
Perfectly parallel - 'facing ... remaining...'

Let me try to explain why it should be 'remaining' and not 'to remain'.
It is true that the portion 'apart............scientific thought' is extra information and we should be able to read the sentence without this part completely. And so it seems like there is no need for parallelism between this portion and the rest of the sentence (i.e. the main portion).

However, because the main portion talks about 'one of these problems' and the portion 'apart...........scientific thought' tells us exactly what are the other problems that are part of this set of problems, there is a need for parallelism ('remaining', 'absorbing' and 'learning'), simply because they all belong to the same pot of problems.

Hence, A and not B. Hope that helps!

Setting off in commas, is only to assert the importance of one over the other. It does not mean that you can ignore the inessential modifiers and be happy with the rest.

Take the following case:

The Brazilian football team, though considered the best in the world, was thoroughly mauled in the field by relatively obscure teams

Can we say that the said team being considered the best in the world has no relevance in the context? After all its ignominious defeat at the hands of relatively obscure teams is even more accentuated by its being considered the best in the world.

Take another case:

My family, apart from my wife and mother, consists of my two children.

This sentence may make a perfectly constructed grammatical sentence, without the parenthesis, but does it make complete sense without the inessential modifiers?

So, let us not just look at the bare structure. Let us also look at the totality of the context, which is what GMAT is trying to insist these days IMO.
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Thanks, I understand your point and agree that setting off in comma doesn't mean that you can ignore that part. Like the second case you mentioned here does not make sense to me without inessential part. But now if change this sentence to this :
John, apart from Michael and Rose, is one of the members of students committee.
Doesn't it make perfect sense if I remove the part within the commas --> John is one of the members of student committee. Now whether I include this inessential part or not, it does not change the meaning of sentence.
So IMO, same holds good for the original question in the post. I don't think that mention of other problems faced changes the meaning/sense of the sentence. Therefore I had this question that why should we make it parallel to the part within the commas.

Ok let's kill the modifier:

A: One of the greatest problems facing Engineering practitioners today ..... is remaining empathetic to the needs ....

B: One of the greatest problems facing Engineering practitioners today ..... is to remain empathetic to the needs ....

So, I chose B, what am I doing wrong? @daagh?

Aki,
Essential or inessential, you are killing some part of the sentence That is the wrong IMO. Secondly opinions will differ from person to person. I will respect your view, if you think //ism is not essential here, even as I stick to my view. That way, may ask a basic question, why should we care about //ism at all, if you think, you can good meaning without It?
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Yeah, I do understand what you are trying to get at.

I would NEVER say something as horrible as "kill the modifier" on the actual GMAT, I was just trying to save typing time

But, your question on "importance" of //ism has kinda left me dumbfounded.

Gun to my head, I'd say that since GMAT gives highest priority to meaning clarity over all else(my personal opinion, could be wrong) so I would chose B.

Again, I have no reasons to prove A is wrong since it has no errors, i just chose B because of meaning clarity.

Based on your statement, it seems you also don't find any grammatical issues with B? (That's what I was hoping you'd find )

daagh : Not able to understand the meaning behind 'One of the problems facing engg. ..'. How can problems be facing something.?

narendran1990
Hi
Problems facing engineers is is just another literary form of writing; It ultimately means that the problems engineers face.
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The source of this topic is an RC question.

One of the greatest challenges facing medical students today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is that of remaining empathetic to the needs of patients in the face of all this rigorous training


You will see that the correct choicein the topic is the same as you find in the RC passage, except for the change of Medical students to Engineering practitioners. Is this passage bonafide or not? If one can accept the RC passage as good enough, then there will be no confusion about accepting A as the correct choice, since the original is using the phrase ‘is remaining’ rather than ‘ to remain”. Absorbing and learning along with ‘is remaining’ is more parallel than absorbing and learning along with ‘to learn’, IMO. All the other choices have other errors. So A.
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Can anyone answer why "facing" is correct.....

I chose "faced by"

One of the greatest problems facing Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is remaining empathetic to the needs of patients in the face of all the rigorous training

A. facing Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is remaining

B. facing Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, is to remain

C. faced by engineering practitioners today apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, which remain

D. faced by Engineering practitioners today, apart from absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, and they remain

E. facing Engineering practitioners today, is absorbing volumes of technical information and learning habits of scientific thought, and besides remaining

Both C and D are inappropriate because "is" should be coming after "One of the greatest problems facing engineering practitioners today.... is _______ "

If you plug in C and D, sentence will be

C - "One of the greatest problems faced by today... which"

D - "One of the greatest problems faced by today...and besides remaining"

Why is Engineering capitalized? What kind of patients do engineers have? What is going on in this problem?

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if we don't consider other issue .... isn't "faced by " looks more correct than "facing" ....anyone please explain?

JDF,
You are quite right. There are some unusual typos. As you say, the E need not have been capitalized and it should be 'clients' instead of patients.
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yes, you are correct!

but there are other problems with options

Option C: no verb present in the sentence
Option D: pronoun error "they".