QUESTION TEXT: Professor: The number of new university…
QUESTION TYPE: Paradox
PARADOX:
- There’s the same number of new chemistry students as ten years ago.
- There’s even better jobs than before.
- Fewer students graduate with chemistry degrees.
ANALYSIS: Based on the facts above, it’s confusing that fewer people are getting chemistry degrees. After all, the same number of people are starting degrees, and they have more motivation than ever to finish. So why aren’t they? To explain this situation, you need something that:
- Is a change from ten years ago.
- Explains why people no longer major in chemistry despite starting in it.
___________
- If you chose this, you probably thought “Ah, the unqualified students must be those that started chemistry!”. That’s helping the answer too much – it’s possible that 20% of new university students are qualified, but none of them are the ones majoring in chemistry.
- This shows that the trend in chemistry isn’t isolated. But it doesn’t explain the facts above.
- This is a trap – this answer doesn’t show a change from ten years ago. This answer suggests that some chemistry majors will switch – but it also suggests they might have switched ten years ago. We need a new factor that explains the change in chemistry graduations since then.
- But chemistry prospects are still better than they used to be. This could have been the right answer if it said “job prospects for related science majors have increased even faster than chemistry’s prospects increased.”
- CORRECT. If first year classes are boring, then some students will leave. And this is a new factor, so it could explain the change.
You might be thinking “but, but, but….can I assume that?”. Yes, yes, yes! Everyone would agree that students stay in majors at least in part based on how interesting the classes are. Increasingly, the LSAT requires you to make this sort of commonsense deduction. (If literally everyone agrees, then you can assume it.)
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Alex says
Hello, I got this one wrong because I fell for choice A.
However I couldn’t follow your explanation. To me this was why it was wrong:
True: more under qualified students = less chemistry graduates OVERALL.
Irrelevant: answers by shifting to ratio (%) rather than why actual number of graduates is less.
Is my thinking flawed here? Thanks!
TutorRosalie (LSATHacks) says
When you come across a question that uses quantifiers like “some” and “many” (exchangeable, by the way), you can’t assume that it’s talking about the group you’re thinking of. Choice A is wrong because it’s too general. We’re only concerned about students who choose to major in chemistry, but A is telling us that many students are entering university without a background necessary to become a chemistry major. But this can mean that those students weren’t planning on becoming chemistry majors anyways. A student who plans on studying anthropology most likely won’t have the necessary academic background for a chemistry degree, but they also aren’t included in the group of students that the professor is concerned with, which is “the number of new university students who enter as chemistry majors”.
Regarding your explanation, there could be more underqualified students, but they could belong to that subset of students who aren’t planning on majoring in chemistry anyways. There have always been students who go to universities but don’t become chemistry majors. So Answer Choice A wouldn’t explain why there’s suddenly a decline in the number of people earning chemistry degrees. However, if the many students were entering chemistry, we’d need to also know that this is an increase over past years, in order to explain a change. But, if the students were entering chemistry, and there was more of them, then this indeed would cause a decline in the number of chemistry grads. Ratio doesn’t play into it.