Potential TO or Potential FOR???? VERY TRICKY

[tim]

If we say a new law has the potential to harm, that means harm could be a consequence of the law, perhaps unintentionally.

If we say a new law has the potential for harm, that means the legislature intended to cause harm, and this law has a pretty good chance of accomplishing that goal.

[DeekshaB1]

Following the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger, investigators concluded that many key people employed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its contractors work an excessive amount of overtime that has the potential of causing errors in judgment.
(A) overtime that has the potential of causing
(B) overtime that has the potential to cause
(C) overtime that potentially can cause
(D) overtime, a practice that has the potential for causing
(E) overtime, a practice that can, potentially, cause

i solved this question using the following methodology. Please let me know if this is correct

Saying that overtime has potential to do something changes the meaning of the sentence. The original sentence says that overtime can potentially cause ...
this eliminates option a, b and d. For the remaining options (c and e) the key question is whether the extra information after that is important or not. Given it is just additional information i marked option E as correct.

[RonPurewal]

i don't think the problem above is from an official source.

if that problem is actually from the GMAT Prep software, please post a screen shot.
thanks.

[DeekshaB1]

Ron, Iam not sure whether the problem is from gmat prep or not. I was just solving the questions on the forum when I came through this problem. I just wanted to check whether my approach is right or not.

Thanks!

[RonPurewal]

the problem is that all of the choices have issues.
choice E is 'least bad', but it is still redundant ('can' + 'potentially').

in any case, you can knock out A/B/C because "that can xxxx" is modifying overtime.
this doesn't make sense. it's not overtime itself that causes errors in judgment. rather, people make errors because they work so much overtime.

[RonPurewal]

ok, i searched the internet for this problem and found that it's from "1000SC", which is quite possibly the worst SC source on the entire internet. (almost every problem in that source has serious problems—excepting only the problems that were stolen from official sources!)

on top of that, there are two questions in the original post (another major violation of the forum rules). so, this thread is now dead.