Our goal here is to describe the advocate's method of reasoning in replying to the politician. The politician claims that a mandatory sentencing law has given the justice system more integrity by decreasing the impact of individual judges on sentencing decisions. The advocate broadly disagrees—and we need to explain how the advocate gets there.

The advocate concludes that the mandatory sentencing law should be repealed, with the implication being that this law actually undermines the system's integrity. This is precisely because it reduces judges' discretion: now, juries will sometimes acquit a defendant entirely rather than subject them to an unfair mandatory sentence. The advocate explains that this leads to inaccurate verdicts, which we can infer is not desirable in our justice system.

In this argument, the advocate does not disagree with the politician's premise that mandatory sentences level the field between judges. The advocate instead relies on an implication of this premise: that juries will now improperly acquit some defendants. This implication undermines the politician's conclusion that mandatory sentences enhance the system's integrity.

We can expect the answer choices to use abstract language, which can make it difficult to see which choices are correct or incorrect. One strategy to address this is to make abstract ideas concrete by linking them back to the stimulus. If an answer choice refers to "a premise of the politician's argument", we want to identify exactly which premise it's talking about so we can assess whether it's accurate, and so on.

Another thing to keep in mind is that even one false claim makes an answer choice wrong. It doesn't matter how good the rest of it looks—as soon as an answer choice says something inaccurate, we can eliminate. This can be helpful to quickly eliminate a few answer choices, leaving us more time to consider any remaining answer choices in more depth.