The Supreme Court has ruled that public universities may collect stude

Whoa, there’s all sorts of weird crap in (A). For starters, “universities may collect student activity fees even with students’ objections to particular activities” literally seems to be saying that activity fees and objections are collected together, somehow. And that doesn’t make sense.

I’m also not thrilled with the pronouns. I’m OK with the “their” at the very end of the sentence, because that seems to refer to the most recent plural noun (“groups”), but I don't love the phrase “they give money to.” I guess “they” is trying to refer to “public universities”, but we have a whole bunch of other plural nouns in the way (“student activity fees”, “students’ objections”, “activities”).

Of course, pronoun ambiguity isn’t an absolute rule on the GMAT (as discussed in this video), but it’s really not awesome when the pronouns are somewhat confusing. Maybe the pronoun isn’t WRONG, but it’s not ideal, either.

I also have absolutely no idea why the future tense “will be” appears in this sentence.

So we have plenty of good reasons to ditch (A).


The first “they” is definitely wrong in (B). The only plural nouns earlier in the sentence are “public universities” and “activity fees”, and neither of those make sense. The sentence is trying to say that universities can collect fees even if students have objections to particular activities – and the only form of “students” in the sentence is actually an adjective (“student activity fees”).

There’s also a meaning issue that stems from the parallelism in (B). We have: “…public universities may collect student activity fees even if they have objections to particular activities and the groups that are given the money are chosen without regard to their views.”

That doesn’t actually make sense: the sentence is not trying to say that universities may collect fees even if groups receive money without regard to their views. The sentence is trying to say that universities may collect fees as long as the groups receive money without regard to their views. That last part is a requirement imposed by the Supreme Court, so it’s wrong to precede the phrase with “even if.”

So (B) is out.


Welp, “they” is still wrong at the beginning of the underlined portion. See the explanations for (A) and (B) above for more on the pronoun issue.

You could also argue that the end of the underlined portion is unnecessarily messy: “the groups that the money is given to have to be” is a very wordy way to say “the groups given money must be…” By itself, this isn’t necessarily WRONG, but it’s not great, either.

And even if you don’t agree with anything I wrote in that last paragraph, the pronoun issues are enough to eliminate (C).

Let’s line up our last two candidates side-by-side:

The meaning of that first part of the underlined portion is very different in (E) than in (D). (E) is literally saying that universities may collect activity fees “even though students” object to certain activities. The trouble is, it’s not clear WHICH students object to the fees. (D), on the other hand, clarifies that universities can collect fees from the specific students who object to particular activities. And the meaning of (D) makes a whole lot more sense, given the context of the sentence.

The last part of the underlined portion is also much better in (D) than in (E). The sentence is trying to say that universities can collect fees only if the groups given money are “chosen without regard to their views.” (D) correctly conveys that meaning with the phrase “so long as”; (E) loses part of the point of the sentence by using “but” instead.

So (E) is out, and (D) is our answer.