Logical reasoning PrepTest 138 · Section 4 · Question 16

First, a little math, since the stimulus here is mean and gives us a fraction and a percent. ? is about 67%. So the out-of-province students dropped from 67% to 40%. These numbers themselves aren’t important - but it is important to know that the ? is significantly higher than the 40%. It just might be helpful to have these in our head. With that noted, we’re trying to draw an inference here. It does seem as if there’s a higher proportion of in-state students paying half the tuition, the total amount of tuition being collected would go down, but that assumes that the student body didn’t change in size significantly. It’s possible that Central Markland became a bigger college while also increasing standards somehow, so we have to be careful about answers that speak to numbers. Short version of this? The stimulus is about percents, so we can’t draw inferences about amounts! We also need to be careful about causality. We know that the shift in the student body happened as academic standards have risen, but there’s no statement causally linking those two. So we know what to eliminate as trap answers, but what about what we can actively look for? Well, that’s a little fuzzier, so let’s head to the answer choices and see if we can find something that lines up with the information presented.