The stimulus tells us that the trustees of the Avonbridge summer drama workshop have decided to offer scholarships to the top 10 percent of local applicants and the top 10 percent of nonlocal applicants as judged on the basis of a qualifying audition.
The rationale for their doing this is that they want to ensure that only the applicants with the most highly evaluated auditions are offered scholarships to the program.
O.K., but what if there is a tangible difference in the quality of local vs. nonlocal applicants? If there is a difference in their quality, then the trustees' plan has a major problem and might not be effective in achieving its goal.
In order to see this problem more easily, let's use some numbers. Let's pretend that there are 100 local applicants and 100 nonlocal applicants. Let's say that each application is evaluated from 0-100, with 100 being the best. The local applicants end up having ratings ranging from 0 to 50 (with the top 10 percent scoring 45 to 50), and the nonlocal applicants end up having ratings from 80 to 100 (with the top 10 percent scoring 95 to 100).
In this hypothetical scenario, the trustees' plan would give scholarships to the local applicants who scored 45 to 50 and the nonlocal applicants who scored 95 to 100, even though ALL of the nonlocal applicants scored higher than the highest-scoring local applicant. In other words, under this example, the trustees' plan would fail at offering the most highly evaluated applicants scholarships to the program.
This is exactly what answer choice D picks up on. D says some of the applicants who are offered scholarships could have less highly evaluated auditions than some of the applicants who are not offered scholarships, which is exactly what we observed in our example.
Answer C says that the top 10 percent of local and nonlocal applicants might not need scholarships to the Avonbridge program. So what? We don't care about what they need; need is not relevant to the trustees' plan. All we care about is which students the trustees are going to offer them to, as the trustees' plan intends to ensure that only the applicants with the most highly evaluated auditions are offered scholarships to the program.
Hope this helps. Let us know if you have more questions!
