Dean of Trinity College: For the past few years, the reputation of our

Question

Dean of Trinity College: For the past few years, the reputation of our college has been declining, because of which we are now able to fill in only 70% of the total available seats. If more research work is done in the college, it will create more visibility and hence more students will start applying to our college. Accordingly, we will be able to increase the student count.

Which of the following, if true, raises the most serious doubt regarding the effectiveness of the Dean's plan in increasing the student count at the college?

A) Increase in research will lead to increased expenditure to compensate for which the college will have to in turn increase the tuition fee that is already considered quite high by applicants.
B) To maintain the required teacher-student ratio, the college will have to hire many new professors.
C) Almost 10% of the student applications are rejected by the college each year.
D) Another college in the area that offers the same courses as Trinity was unsuccessful in increasing its visibility by increasing its engagement in research work.
E) The Government will not increase the funding for Trinity, even if the college increases the research work it is doing.

TaN1213 · Answer

A does the best job by providing a serious disadvantage of the research work done in college. Even if research succeeds in grabbing the attention of students, higher tution fee will impede the applications.
E- what if the college gets a sponsor, then research will be beneficial.
C - This is a part of the process. We can not raise questions on the procedure of applicant selection.
D- typical Gmat trap
B - Irrelevant.

punchy196 · Answer

I was left with options A and D. But chose D, as it directly relates to the situation at hand.
Please do explain why D stands no chance. Thanks in advance !

Vignesh11794 · Answer

I Still feel that the options feel irrelavant. Answer (A) might seem good, but I think the college just wants to increase visibility. Nowhere it is mentioned that it has shortage of funds or it needs to increase profitablity etc. "Money" is not the issue here. They just want fame and visibility by increasing the student count no matter what.

AlexTheTrainer · Answer

Weaken questions engage in “inductive reasoning”, meaning the correct answer is allowed to introduce information not contained in the stimulus. It just needs to be reasonably relevant.

“Reasonably relevant” can be understandably irritating for GMAT students - just know that “reasonableness” is a very real US legal standard (its even in the Constitution).

Answer (A) introduces “outside information” in the form of increased tuition. For this answer to be correct, we need to assume the increased tuition translates into fewer students applying. In pure “deductive reasoning” (virtually nonexistent on the GMAT, but common on the LSAT), this assumption wouldn’t fly.

But inductive reasoning allows for what could be called “real world” situations - like how increasing tuition would lead to fewer applicants. That is, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that increase tuition leads to fewer applicants.

But what about D? Introducing other colleges experiences might very well be relevant. But not in this case because the other colleges’ experiences demonstrate they failed to increase their visibility, which is NOT the issue/reasoning supporting the original conclusion.

WHY is the conclusion of this argument true? That is, why will the college increase their “student count?” Because more students will apply. Period.

Any information supporting the evidence/premises is irrelevant. WHY is the evidence true? That is, WHY will more students apply? Because visibility will be increased.

Everyone knows that evidence/premises from an argument is assumed to be true. This means that anything that supports this evidence must be irrelevant. We don’t care why it’s true, because we assume it’s true.

Answer D indicates that other colleges were unable to increase visibility after increasing its research. We don’t care about other colleges unable to increase their visibility - the argument has already established as truth that for Trinity college specifically, increased research will lead to increased visibility.

On a separate note: this seems to be a non-official question (I tried looking it up, please correct me if I’m wrong). Recall that official verbal questions are essentially written by committee, with data-driven revisions not available to anyone else. This makes strict analysis of expert written questions a little bit tricky.

This one was awesome, though. The writer clearly knows his or her logic.

Posted from my mobile device

i5haan · Answer

The situation here can be that maybe that college was just not as reputed as Trinity, or went wrong with some other process maybe.

i5haan · Answer

The problem says that 
1) Investing in research will lead to increase in spending 
2)That spending will be covered by Increasing Fees
3) it says in the end that the current fee is already considered to be high by applicants. 
And that provides us with a problem about why Trinity is not being able to increase the no. of Applicants.
Hence, (A) weakens the argument.

AlexTheTrainer · Answer

The stimulus asserts as truth that, at least for Trinity, increasing research will lead to increased visibility which will lead to increased number of applicants. Whether this isn’t true for others is irrelevant.

The question is whether an increase in applicants will lead to an increase in school enrollment. Sticker shock (higher tuition) will be a problem in this situation.

Posted from my mobile device

VerbalBot · Answer

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Dean of Trinity College: For the past few years, the reputation of our

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