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VerbalCritical Reasoning

Free GMAT Critical Reasoning Practice Question

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Every employee who has been promoted to a management position at Halverson Logistics in the past five years had completed the company's leadership-development course before being promoted. On the basis of this record, the human resources director concludes that any current employee who completes the leadership-development course can expect to be promoted to a management position. The director's reasoning is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it

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Answer & Explanation

Correct answer

C

Name-the-flaw. First state exactly what the argument does, then match the abstract description that captures its specific error.

What the premise establishes: completing the leadership-development course is something every promoted manager had done. That makes course completion a shared requirement among those promoted, in other words a condition that appears necessary for promotion at this company. What the director concludes is much stronger: that completing the course is enough to expect promotion. The argument therefore slides from 'all who got promoted had done this' to 'doing this gets you promoted.' That is the classic error of treating a condition that everyone with the outcome happened to satisfy as though it were sufficient to produce the outcome. Plenty of employees could complete the course without ever being promoted, because completing it may be required but not enough.

(C) is correct because it states this error in general terms: it points out that a condition met by everyone who attained the result is being treated as enough to guarantee that result. That is precisely the necessary-versus-sufficient confusion in the stem.

(A) is a plausible trap because the argument really does reason from past employees to current ones. But generalizing from a track record to future cases is a normal inductive step, not the decisive flaw; the argument would still fail even if applied only to past employees, because the shared requirement was never shown to be sufficient.

(B) describes reverse causation, claiming the director assumes promotion causes course completion. The director assumes the reverse, that course completion brings promotion, so this misstates the direction of the reasoning and names a flaw that is not present.

(D) raises sample size, but the premise speaks of every promoted employee, so the conclusion does not lean on a small or unrepresentative sample. The defect is in the logic, not in how many cases were observed.

(E) alleges that a key term changes meaning between premise and conclusion. No such shift exists: completing the course and being promoted mean the same thing throughout, so there is no equivocation to exploit.