A report of a government survey concluded that Center City was among

Always read the question stem before tackling the stimulus. Here we see a golden example of why that’s so important. Just by reading the stem, we know that this question asks for the one choice that the school official could use to identify the flaw in the survey report. So what’s wrong with that survey report? The survey asked all Center City residents over the age of 19 if they were high school graduates. Based on their response, the survey report concluded that the city is among the ten worst cities with respect to the dropout rate from its schools. Do you see the problem? The survey asked all residents over 19, whether or not they actually attended school in the city, if they were grads. What if a significant number of the dropouts moved to the city after dropping out from some other city’s schools? This would change the findings. The results would be different if the methodology employed by the survey took the distinction in (C) into account, and the school official can justifiably criticize the report for failing to do so.

(A) Since the survey report concluded that the city has one of the worst dropout rates from its schools (and not just its high schools), the survey does take into account dropouts that occurred before high school.

(B) The survey report concerned high school dropouts. The existence of over-achievers who finished school more quickly than usual is irrelevant.

(D) and (E) The future effects of the report (D) and the value of the city’s high school diplomas (E) are both outside the scope of the argument.

• Let the question stem guide your work. After reading this stem, we know that there’s a flaw and that it’s in the survey report, so we can focus all of our energy on finding that flaw.

ALl B,D and E are out of scope, "those who are not" are ambiguous to me. It refers to those who were not highschool graduate or not city citizens, I cannot guess it.

Hi everyone,

The situation is the following: CC has a high rate of dropout from its schools. A survey asks people over the age of 19 whether they graduated from high school or not. The city official disagrees based on his data.

Strengthen question

We need to strengthen the City official conclusion.

Option C works really well because it highlights how the survey could have gathered data from people who attended schools outside of City center.
Option A would be tempting if we were talking about just high school dropouts but we are talking about schools dropouts.

Option C

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