Q15 - A report of a government

[b91302310]

The argument mentions that the survey data were obtained by asking all city residents over the age of 19, whether they were high school graduates but not ask whether they graduated from the city's schools. So, the graduates of the survey should include those receiving schooling elsewhere or in the city,as long as they are graduates. Thus, why (C) is correct? Could anyone help with this?

Thanks.

[cyruswhittaker]

The report concludes that the city had a very high dropout rate from its schools.

To support this claim, the survey questioned all city residents over the age of 19.

Here lies the problem. This proportion would be more representative of the relative amount of dropouts in the city as a whole.

The reason that this does not accurately represent the dropout rate from the city's schools is that it could be extremely biased: perhaps many people from other cities moved in, and they dropped out of high school.

Maybe the city supports lots of jobs that don't require a highschool education and so a big percentage of the population are people who dropped out..that would definately affect the survey report.

In order for the survey to form a conclusion about just those people who went to the city's schools, it would have needed to restrict the data to those who went to the city's schools.

[ptraye]

did any of you notice a typo in this stimulus? i saw "of official..." it may just be my book.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Not just your book, but it is a typo! I have that same typo repeated in some copies of that test that I have, but not in others. Our curriculum team has been notified to make sure that our copies get that expunged. Thanks for pointing it out!

[magnusgan]

In the last line it says results not accurate according to schools' (plural) figures.

This means that the survey was not representative of all schools in the ten cities. Asking "all city residents" could mean every resident who lived in a city, any city.

The only way the survey results could be wrong would then be (A), which I picked. If a ton of people who responded to the survey were from Center City and dropped out before they reached high school, that would severely skew the data to make it appear as though Center City had a disproportionately large number of dropouts.

So... Is the stimulus supposed to say school's (singular) or schools' (plural)?

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Hey magnusgan, I'm sure I see it quite the same way.

There are probably many schools in Center City, and to find the dropout rate in Center City, I think it would be prudent to make sure that data from all schools is considered. However, the survey was conducted by polling residents, not schools.

So lets think about the situation that Center City is the only place in the entire world. If we were to conduct a survey just as was described in the stimulus, it'd be a perfectly fine way of determining the dropout rate. If 20% of people responded that they had NOT graduated from high school, the dropout rate would be 20%--it doesn't matter at what point they dropout. Whether they dropped out in the 8th grade or the 12th grade, they still dropped out.

The only way the survey could be wrong, is if it was not complete or was not representative of the actual population, or if people who responded to the survey, who now live in Center City, did not attend schools in Center City. In that case, why should dropouts from elsewhere count against the dropout rate of schools located in Center City?

Hope that helps!

[magnusgan]

Hey Matt, thanks for getting back to me.

I wrote a huge post before realizing why I was wrong. The school official IS in fact looking at all the data from all schools up to high school and then concluding the data aren't right. I got confused by the part of the survey where they mentioned high school grads and thought that the survey set was somehow related to them. Well, it isn't... Surveyed all city residents and did a dropout / not dropout count with dropout defined as any resident who didnt attend high school.

I'll leave my flawed reasoning (1) intact so somebody else will be able to learn from my mistake. It's flawed because anyone who didnt graduate high school already includes the set of all dropouts from any earlier level of education.

Survey aim:
Dropout rate by city

Dropout criteria:
If high school graduate --> not dropout
Else --> dropout

A city school official looks at all the schools' figures, nationwide, and says it isn't accurate. Why do I have so many more dropouts than accounted for in my books?!

There are 2 ways to be inaccurate:

(1) - the city's dropout rate was determined by counting HIGH SCHOOL graduates when the aim of the survey was to obtain an OVERALL dropout rate. This flaw is addressed in answer choice (A)

(2) - the city's dropout rate is skewed by out of state students who dropped out from schools back home but get accounted for in their new city. This flaw is addressed in (C).

[zacharymosesdavid]

I originally picked answer choice A as well. Only after re-reading the stimulus a couple times did I realize why A does not represent a failure on the part of the survey report.

Because the report made a conclusion about the dropout rate of the school, it doesn't matter when drop-outs dropped out. So a failure to take into account the number of times that a respondent dropped out before reaching high school would not affect the dropout rate whatsoever.

C was attractive all along and I knew I should have picked it, but I read "highest dropout rate" in the first sentence as "highest high school dropout rate" "” when a variation of the word "high" precedes "dropout rate," sometimes your mind shortcuts its way into thinking about "high school dropout rates."

I don't think the poster above me made it entirely clear why A is wrong, so that's the intention of this post.

[zjce]

"highest high school dropout rate" "” when a variation of the word "high" precedes "dropout rate," sometimes your mind shortcuts its way into thinking about "high school dropout rates."

it is also noteworthy that it is followed by "FROM ITS SCHOOLS"

[donghai819]

It took me 15 mins to understand this question:

Core: the survey asked all city resident over 19 whether they were high school graduates and computed the proportion who were not ---> Center City was among the ten cities in the nation with highest dropout rate from its school.

All residents -----> a good representative of its schools graduates ????

NO.

Maybe many residents dropped out from high schools in other cities and moved to Center City; maybe they didn't even finish any education; maybe they were just illiterate.


Any comment is appreciated!

[LolaC289]

I didn't pay attention to the report's conclusion that CC has the highest dropout rate from its schools, which turned out to be the crux of this solving this problem.

But when I looked at the report, I thought: residents over the age of 19? Maybe many people who are 19, 20 years old are still in high schools, they just haven't graduate from high school yet, which doesn't make them "dropouts". So I went with (B).

However, to all those thought the way, (B) actually had it backwards. Instead of mentioning people who are still in high school, it brings up people who completed high school in fewer years than usual. It doesn't matter if they are early high school graduates or normal high school graduates, because they are all counted as "non-dropout" in our report, which has nothing to do with the dropouts we need to address.