Q9 - Ted, a senior employee, believes he is

[ohthatpatrick]

Question Type:
Principle-Support

Stimulus Breakdown:
Decision: Don't try to replace Ted.
Evidence: He makes some valuable, unique, and maybe irreplaceable contributions.
Counterevidence: He works less than others and thereby other people work harder than they should.

Answer Anticipation:
We would need a Principle that prioritizes Ted's positive trait (makes some great contributions, which are obvious to everyone) over Ted's negative trait (keeps short hours and causes others to work harder than they should). Or we just need any rule that takes something we know about the Ted situation and says, "If that's the case, then don't request a replacement".

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Yes, this looks like a winner! This reads, in contrapositive form, "if a supervisor doesn't know an employee's work could be equally duplicated by another employee, then the supervisor should not request that the employee be replaced". In Ted's case, he makes "unique and perhaps irreplaceable contributions", so he would trigger this rule and justify Tatiana's decision.

(B) The decision is only whether or not to replace, so how someone should be compensated is irrelevant.

(C) This is probably tempting to people, but applying this principle would say that "Tatiana was not entitled to make a decision". We're trying to pick an answer that gets us as close to "Tatiana made the correct decision". If this answer said "Only someone with greater authority than [Tatiana] is entitled to request a replacement", then it would work better. But this rule says Tatiana is NOT ENTITLED TO DECIDE whether an employee should be replaced, and Tatiana DID DECIDE whether an employee should be replaced. So it is not a match.

(D) This is about how workers should regard themselves; it's useless in telling us whether the supervisor made the correct decision.

(E) This helps us measure an employee's contributions, but we need to measure the correctness of a supervisor's decision.

Takeaway/Pattern: The best shortcut on Principle-Support questions is making sure the answer choice has the power to reach the conclusion.

Here, we needed a principle that would say, "Do NOT request that Ted be replaced" to a supervisor. Only (A) and (C) had any language that connected to proving/supporting T's decision.

#officialexplanation

[krisk743]

I have a question about this. It's fairly simple and I circled A at first but felt off and went back to circle D. The only reason I did is that I get confused about the "should" and "should not".

There are questions that say you can not find an answer about should not when the conclusion says should, and vise versa and I always hesitate to circle them because of this idea. If you should do something, negating it doesn't necessarily mean you "should not" do it...right??

What's the difference here? Please if someone can answer that question because i'm constantly getting nailed by these questions that are pretty straight forward but letting my mind clutter up with this stuff.