Q17 - Only a very small percentage

[tamwaiman]

At first I thought that the stimulus shift the scope from the 600 largest to the most, for the reason that maybe "the most" stands for 60000 corporations, so I choose (C).

Can someone help to explain where my blind spot is?
Thanks.

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Ah! Good question.

The problem here is that while the argument equates the 600 largest corporations with the "most important corporate boardrooms," answer choice (C) equates the 600 largest corporations with typical corporate boardrooms.

So the difference there is between, the "most important boardrooms" and "typical corporate boardrooms." Answer choice (C) mixes up the assumption that you picked up on.

The flaw committed in this argument though is that while only a small percentage of members in the service professions actually make it to corporate boardrooms, it's possible (although unlikely in the real world) that everyone on a corporate board could have at one point or another been a member of the service professions.

Answer choice (B) best reflects this error in reasoning.

Does that help clear this one up?

[wj097]

The flaw committed in this argument though is that while only a small percentage of members in the service professions actually make it to corporate boardrooms, it's possible (although unlikely in the real world) that everyone on a corporate board could have at one point or another been a member of the service professions.

Answer choice (B) best reflects this error in reasoning.

Does that help clear this one up?

Hey Matt, I differ on the understanding of the flaw: while % out of total service professionals that make to the board maybe very small, there might just be so many compared to any given industry sector that it outnumbers when it comes to representation on the board.

I wasn't sure how your concept of current/ex-service professionals fits into the flaw.

[kburgess.anderson]

I'm struggling to see the "ex vs. current service professions" argument myself, but thanks Atticus Finch, I finally see why B is correct. Even if a small percentage of members of the service industry are on the board, they could still be a large percentage of the board. This even makes practical sense: the entire service industry is HUGE, whereas the total number of board members of the 600 largest North American corporations could be quite small, relatively. THus, a small percentage of such a large group could actually be a huge percentage of a much smaller group of board members.

[WaltGrace1983]

I really like the analysis going on here. I was able to eliminate A, D, and E very quickly but I couldn't eliminate B and I ended up choosing C. C was close but not quite. Here is what I got:

Small percentage of service professionals ever become board members of 600 largest North American corporations

-->

Service professionals are underrepresented in the most important corporate boardrooms in North America.

There is some bad apples=oranges logic going on here. We are first of all talking about what is true of the "largest" to be true of the "most important." Then we are talking about "percentages" and supposedly absolute numbers here. Whenever the LSAT says something about "percentage" I hone in on it - there is just so many times that the LSAT plays this hand! So with these in mind, I go on to the answer choices. I'll start with the ones I was able to eliminate easier. I would love some feedback on my reasoning:

(A) 600 is too small a sample. Maybe. Maybe not. We don't know how many corporations there are in North America. Maybe if the argument said that there were 5,000,000 corporations then we could make (A) into a great flaw but the thing is that 600 is quite a large number without knowledge of how many corporations there are.

(D) We are talking about smaller corporations from the get-go. This is not a good start because our argument is talking about the "600 largest North American corporations." This answer choice is basically saying that the smaller corporations don't care about what the largest corporations do. That's great...but we don't care.

(E) "Socially responsible?" This is basically an automatic elimination. Big scope issues here.

Now onto (C) and (B)

(C) looks good. It really does. It has all the right language that I was looking for and it was really tempting (as I have shown) to pick it and move on. BUT WAIT - "boardrooms generally" is not the same as "the most important corporate boardrooms." What if it is the case that boardrooms generally have a great representation of service professionals? Couldn't it still be the case that they are underrepresented in the "most important" boardrooms? Absolutely. We don't need to prove anything about what is happening GENERALLY - we need to prove something about what is happening in the MOST IMPORTANT boardrooms.

(B) looks great...now . (B) is saying that we don't know very much about the % of service professionals on the boards. The reason why this is a really tough answer choice is because I was expecting something about "most important" to creep up. It doesn't. However, if we know the % of service professionals on the boards but we don't know anything about the % of board members who are service professionals, how do we know anything about how represented or underrepresented the board members are? Maybe there are 1,000,000 service professionals and 1% of them are on boards of the most important corporations - 600 in total (assuming that "largest" = "most important." If every corporation only have 100 seats then this would mean that there are only 60,000 seats with 10,000 service professionals. I would say that 1-6 ratio is VERY good representation