June 2010 LSAT Section 4 Question 24

Music critic: How well an underground rock group's recordings sell is no mark of that group's success as an undergro...

mahonmk14 on August 5 at 06:36PM

Incompetence to success

Hi! I am struggling to see where in the stimulus it is clear that incompetence means the band is unsuccessful. This is one of those times where I didn't choose the answer because I thought this choice was trying to trick us into assuming that incompetence means being unsuccessful. Of course this seems logical to anyone with a grasp on success, BUT its not explicitly stated.

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Emil-Kunkin on August 7 at 04:11PM

Hi, the passage doesn't explicitly make that connection, which is one of the reasons that B is correct. The passage does seem to imply that incompetence is a reason for lack of sales, and I think most reasonable people would argue that incompetence would generally mean lack of success. But, given that we already have one counterintuitive finding here, that selling too many records can actually mean you're unsuccessful, we may need to actually establish that writhing this genre incompetence does indeed preclude success.

B does exactly that. Additionally it confirms that selling out also would mean being unsuccessful within this genre, which supports the conclusion that record sales are not a reliable indicator of success as an underground group.

Emil-Kunkin on August 7 at 04:12PM

I realize I never actually explicitly said this: it's a flaw of the passage that if fails to connect success to competence.