medium · GRE Verbal

The university proposes to boost graduation rates by requiring struggling first-year students to attend weekly tutoring. **Students who voluntarily attend tutoring do graduate at markedly higher rates than those who never attend.** Critics warn, though, that voluntary attendees are precisely the students already most motivated to succeed. **The higher graduation rate may therefore reflect the motivation that leads students to seek tutoring, rather than any benefit the tutoring itself confers — in which case mandating it for the unmotivated could accomplish little.** In the argument, the two boldface portions play which of the following roles?

1. The first is the correlation the university relies on; the second is the critics' conclusion challenging the university's inference from that correlation.
2. The first is the university's own main conclusion about tutoring; the second is a piece of supporting evidence that the critics offer to reinforce that same conclusion.
3. The first is a factual premise that the critics reject outright as false; the second is the alternative claim they put forward to replace the premise they have rejected.
4. The first and the second are both intermediate conclusions that the critics themselves fully endorse in the course of building their case against the university.
5. The first is a piece of evidence advanced for the critics' position; the second is the university's rebuttal aimed at neutralizing it.

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