Self-study
I am looking to refine my understanding of WSE (weaken, strengthen, evaluate) questions. I have noticed that, in the explanation for these questions, 7sage often assigns certain tags (alternate explanation, directionally wrong, etc) to both correct and incorrect answer choices. Is there a resource on 7sage where I can learn more about these WSE tags?
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Someone noticed!
We're going to add some tooltips to help users understand these tags. But for now this is what we mean:
Alternate explanation answer choice tag
Weaken Qs: Answers that introduce/support an alternate explanation for a phenomenon. Strengthen Qs: Answers that help eliminate an alternate explanation for a phenomenon.
Causal mechanism answer choice tag
Answers that help establish how an alleged cause could produce the alleged effect.
Directionally wrong answer choice tag
Answers that, if they have any effect, do the opposite of what we want (weaken when we're trying to strengthen, or strengthen when we're trying to weaken).
Failed alternate explanation answer choice tag
Weaken Qs: Answers that try to introduce an alternate explanation, but fall short, or try to explain a different phenomenon. Strengthen Qs: Answers that try to eliminate an alternate explanation, but fall short, or try to eliminate an explanation for a different phenomenon.
Fighting the hypo answer choice tag
Answers that aren't relevant because they ignore a hypothetical condition that we're supposed to treat as true. (e.g., the conclusion says "If John is hungry, he'll order pizza" and an answer says, "John isn't hungry")
Illusory inconsistency answer choice tag
Answers that appear to contradict a premise or conclusion, but are actually consistent with them.
Irrelevant corroboration answer choice tag
Answers that provide additional support for a claim that the argument doesn't need more support for.
@Kevin_Lin Hi, could you please explain what the Plausibility answer choice tag means?
@EchoVortex Oops, I missed that:
Plausibility answer choice tag
Weaken Qs: Answers that undermine an explanation by providing evidence that doesn't fit what we'd expect if that explanation were true
Strengthen Qs: Answers that strengthen an explanation by providing corroborating evidence (i.e. evidence that fits what we'd expect if that explanation were true)
Example: Let's say the author's causal assumption is that vaccines cause cancer.
We could weaken the argument by showing that people who take vaccines are not more likely to get cancer than people who don't take vaccines. And you could strengthen the argument by showing that people who take vaccines are more likely to get cancer than others (if there wasn't already a correlation between vaccines and cancer).
@Kevin_Lin Is this the complete list of what you guys will be using when assigning answer choice tags?