Q1 - A nonprofit organization concerned with

[mshinners]

Question Type:
Flaw

Stimulus Breakdown:
An organization sent out a letter to 5,000 people asking for money and opinions. Of the 300 responses, the vast majority agreed with the organization's position on the issue in the fundraising letter. From this, the argument concludes that there's a really good chance ("suggests") that the majority of the 5,000 people agreed with the position.

Answer Anticipation:
Whenever there are surveys or statistics in an LSAT question, it's a good idea to check to see if the sample is representative. Here, the author tries to draw a conclusion about the 5,000 people who received letters based on the responses of 300. Is there any reason to believe these 300 are unrepresentative? There sure is.

Those who will respond to a fundraising letter are almost certainly more likely to support the issue over which money is being raised than those who don't respond to the call for money. In this case, since it's possible the respondents are unrepresentative of the 5,000 overall, we should look for an answer that brings up the sampling flaw. Also, since we're given a specific reason to question the representativeness of this group (that they were the ones who were willing to donate), we should expect the correct answer to reflect that.

Correct Answer:
A

Answer Choice Analysis:
(A) Bingo. This is exactly the sampling flaw we were looking for, down to referencing the likelihood of those who are willing to donate of being unrepresentative ("quite likely").

(B) Out of scope. This answer is trying to make you think that we can't reach the conclusion without assuming that people's positions don’t change over time. However, since the survey is a single survey and talks about the present agreement, this answer choice is out of scope.

(C) Out of scope. This is a confusing answer, but it's essentially saying that the survey was confusing or bad in some way, and people's responses didn’t properly capture their opinions (""responses…did not correctly reflect the opinions of the respondents.""). Think Florida in 2000, with people accidentally voting Buchanan.

This answer is trying to get you to think that it's an answer about a sampling flaw, stating that the reponses didn't reflect the opinions of some group. However, a sampling flaw is when the reponses don't reflect the view of the overall group; this answer is about the responses not reflecting the view of the respondents, who are the ones who actually answered the call.

(D) If anything, opposite. We draw a conclusion about 5,000 based on 300, not the other way around. While the conclusion is based on the majority of the 300 that responded, the conclusion itself isn't about a small part of that 300.

(E) Out of scope. The argument is about the beliefs of people; it doesn't care if the survey itself influenced those beliefs.

Takeaway/Pattern: Whenever an LSAT question brings up a survey or statistics/response rates, start thinking about a sampling flaw. When the survey has additional "stuff" attached to it (here, a call for money), there's almost always a chance that the results are skewed.

#officialexplanation

[allenkw90]

For answer choice (A), does the word “observation” make sense? I crossed it out because there was no observation in the stimulus. Shouldn’t it rather say responses?

[ohthatpatrick]

The author of this paragraph observes that the subgroup of respondents (300 ppl) was strongly in favor of the organization’s position.

From this observation, the author concludes that most of the organization’s mailing list (5000 ppl) are strongly in favor of the organization’s position.

I see what you’re thinking, in terms of the fact that had it said “It draws this conclusion from responses of a subgroup”, we would agree to that being descriptively accurate. There were 300 responses, and those responses constitute the author’s evidence.

(A) is basically saying that, but instead of saying “we drew our conclusion from those 300 responses”, it’s “we drew our conclusion from our noticing that 283 of those 300 responses were positive ones”.

Either one would be fine, is my point. If you can make it work, be charitable to the wording. Naturally, that’s a delicate line to walk (because stretching the text too far can allow us to talk ourselves into a trap answer).