10. Competitive figure skaters are judged by panels of up to

[inesa909]

Hello all,
I was having some trouble understanding the reasoning behind why B was the correct answer for this inference question. What made it particularly confusing for me was that the stimulus discusses different judging systems, but I felt that the answers discussing the differences between the two sports were unsupported because we were not given any information about the differences between diving and figure skating.

Thank you so much in advance!

[sumukh09]

Hi,

The answers were discussing the differences between the two types of judging systems and not the differences in the types of sports. We can infer what B is saying here because there is a potential for bias in judging competitive figure skating, and a potential for bias makes a system less fair than one in which this potential is reduced. We don't really need the stimulus to discuss the differences in the two sports - it's essentially irrelevant for the purposes of this question. Our focus should be on the fairness of the two judging systems and how reducing the chances of of bias in one system makes it a fairer system than the other.

For more on why B is correct, competitive figure skating, using its current system, does not require the highest and lowest scores to be discarded. This means that a judge might show bias if they give a particular figure skater a score of 6, or if they give a score of 1 since both those scores are extremes in the scoring scale; either the figure skater would really have to suck to earn a 1 or be really awesome to earn a 6. However, to be sure that there are no other - unwarranted - reasons for giving a particular figure skater a 1 or 6, discarding any judge's score who gave a 1 or 6 would help reduce the possibility that there was a bias in their evaluation. Thus, competitive figure skating, without this system in place, has a greater possibility of bias than competitive diving, which currently uses this system of discarding the highest and lowest scores.

[maryadkins]

Good discussion here. Yes, because we're told that figure skating is judged X way and diving is judged Y way and that the way diving is judged "is a fairer system" because it "eliminates the possibility of bias," (B) is supported. That's the difference between the two.

(A) isn't supported, because we don't know if they disagree more.

(C) is the opposite of what's inferable.

(D) distorts the reasoning for why diving is fairer.

(E) takes it too far in the opposite direction"”without the discarding, diving could possibly be AS biased as figure skating, but we don't know that, and we certainly don't know that it would be MORE vulnerable to bias.