This question is a reason I read through all the answers and use process of elimination - even when I'm confident in the answer. Answer paranoia is useful in situations like this when you might not catch the reason why it's right by just skimming. It's a conclusion - more than that, it's a sub-conclusion!

As soon as I read C, the JY voice in my head said "WHO CARES about the students"

@BenjaminDooley

This is my thought process on your question:

The conclusion says that colored paper is should be used. But for what should it be used? When teaching art students.

The premises state that colored paper is preferable because it has these traits. Okay, but is that relevant to teaching? What if it's only relevant when first trying out different mediums of art? (Maybe there's a better example, but that's what I can think of rn).

I got this question wrong at first because I glazed over the stimulus and got tricked into making the assumption that colored paper should be used because of the premises. But the right answer just gives you what you already assumed.

For those suffering from Necessary Assumption questions, here's another one for you:

Premise: Who cares what James thinks? ( JY doesn't)

Conclusion: James suffers from middle child syndrome.

What is the necessary assumption? :)

Note: When making visual representations, make sure to keep track of which decisions were arbitrary!

I eliminated A because it refers to harming "someone" which doesn't necessarily mean it's talking about the target of the joke.

This is a common pattern in wrong answers which I sometimes glaze over: "Should have realized" vs. "believed"

Other examples:

"occurred" vs. "believed"

The question is not asking for additional reasons, instead take the reasons already provided in the stimulus and make them more relevant

I would previously be slower at reading these type of stimuli if I don't understand a word or would get stuck on some pronunciation. In this question, I ended up just changing Hagerle to H as soon as the narrator (me) in my head was saying it. I got through it so much quicker this way than if I didn't use this trick :)

Hope this helps someone too!

I got this right and was so confident about it - just to have a different way of getting the answer (hopefully that's still a good thing...).

Process of elimination works wonders, of course. But I also thought A strengthened the analogy that fraud in physics and fraud in biology worked relatively similar, because it broadens the topic to "scientific fraud" (and they both fall in this category). Or even biology and physics both fall within the "scientific discipline" category mentioned in A.

Is this a good way of thinking about this? Or is this sort of thought process not the best when it comes to these types of questions? Like maybe it worked because it was this specific stimulus?

Without the prior lesson, I don't know if I would have guessed this was an argument by analogy

In this question, I got confused by the previous lesson which mentioned that for causal logic weakening questions, we can find an alternative hypothesis in the answers to weaken the argument.

I found that it helped, in this instance, to forget about an alternative hypothesis (the answer just did not seem like one to me). Instead, it helped to just focus on weakening the support (that is, what supports the tv program being biased) on a more intuitive level.

Moral of the story: don't even try Goku, try his beam :)

My hypothesis before reading the explanation: Perhaps Detective Conan solves the most difficult of cases while the average detective solves around 35% relatively easy cases.

After reading the explanation: surprised pikachu face

Is there another explanation possible that someone else can think of?

Any strategies to get through this question more quickly? I thought diagramming would take too long, but I ended up taking long anyways because of all of the conditional relationships.

Writing this out helped me come to terms that C is completely wrong (I changed it to D during blind review but still didn't eliminate C), I hope this helps someone else too!

C is incorrect because it says "most coffeehouses that are well-designed". The stimulus mentions "most well-designed public places" -- coffeehouses would be a subset of that if they were well-designed. We don't know if this applies to coffeehouses as well:

coffeehouse -> public place -m-> feature artwork

It would have been different if the -m-> was like this:

coffeehouse -m-> public place -> feature artwork

REMEMBER:

A -m-> B -> C means A -m-> C

HOWEVER, this relationship gets lost and does not apply when A -> B -m-> C. This is what we saw in wrong answer C.

He read my mind...I diagrammed pet stores...shameful, I know.

INSTEAD, kick things up the domain. We know from reading the rest of the stimulus, that it is only talking about pet stores in West Calverton so we can momentarily ignore that and go straight into the other conditions!

@Njbrunette This is what had me stumped at first, since I felt like diagramming would take too long under timed conditions. But getting overwhelmed with a long conditional relationship and trying to do it in my head just eats up the time anyway (for this one at least, it was just so looooong)

Reminders:

Do not get tricked by mistaken reversals! (That's why I could not eliminate B when I did this problem on my own.)

Conditional relationships can still be represented in the text, regardless of whether it has clear indicator words.

y'all - don't let the LSAT fry your brain to the point that you accidentally choose the wrong answer...I meant to choose B after going through the answer choices but my fingers failed me T-T

Since there are so many indicator words, it is helpful to note that "even" does not have a logical implication. It is just an emphasis.

@arieatsoranges I had the same question. When I initially read the stimulus, I thought "frankness" was referring to Pat's "self-revelation" as Amar is responding to Pat's statement after all.

3/5 to 5/5. focus is no joke - it makes all the difference (I need coffee to wake up)

I have to drill this into my head when I'm hesitant about implicit answers:

The right answer is not always the ideal answer for Point at Issue questions.

This is an interesting approach to Point at Issue questions:

Thinking of an implicit Point at Issue question stem as similar to a Most Strongly Supported question (if the PAI question stem contains modifiers like "most support" or "suggest") - we must infer the point.

Also similar to MSS questions, most wrong answers will be "merely consistent with" the stimulus.

The process of elimination will be key to finding the right answer if we cannot catch the implicit PAI beforehand.

I could not eliminate E but I could not choose it as the right answer either. Now I understand why - the strength of the answer does not match the strength of the stimulus. The stimulus points to a potential for something to happen, while E wrongly assumes that this potential is definite (says "increases" when it could have instead said "could increase").