The biggest help for me with 4/5 star questions in general is to flip mindsets when I've narrowed down to 2 or 3 ACs, from the initial "explain why the single correct AC is correct" to "explain why the other ACs are incorrect." I personally go into Flaw questions trying to think what jumps out at me as the argument's predominant flaw at a fairly general level then look through the ACs for something that matches, so trying to disprove ACs that hinge on more specific points that I didn't think of when making my initial guess helps me be more confident in my choice.

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The biggest help for me with 4/5 star questions in general is to flip mindsets when I've narrowed down to 2 or 3 ACs, from the initial "explain why the single correct AC is correct" to "explain why the other ACs are incorrect." I personally go into Flaw questions trying to think what jumps out at me as the argument's predominant flaw at a fairly general level then look through the ACs for something that matches, so trying to disprove ACs that hinge on more specific points that I didn't think of when making my initial guess helps me be more confident in my choice.

Ok got it, that sounds like a better approach. One question here: what do you do if the correct answer choice is something that didn't jump out at you intitially? Sometimes, one of the AC's will have a flaw that is really tough to identify from just reading the stim but ends up being right -- how do you make sure you're not accidentally eliminating that one?

This definitely happens to me as well! I won’t spend ages on the stim trying to think up flaws if at least one isn’t immediately apparent; if my mind is blank about what a single possible flaw could be, I move on to the ACs and start granting their truth one at a time. I’ll imagine someone else telling the speaker, “actually, X is the case here” then imagine what the effects of it being true on the argument are. It’s true in my opinion that “finding a flaw” initially doesn’t seem to have a lot of room for building up as a skill outside of repetition and remembering some common routes of attack (@) but absent any of those, fundamentals like distinguishing premises from conclusions, and establishing necessary assumptions can help get the argument’s precise structure and bounds down, and from there I find that it’s just an intuitive process that I have to drill to improve.

I think this is overall why weakening and flaw questions are consistently some of toughest questions for me too- I don’t think there’s many “tricks” or common shortcuts you can take to shorten the process on really difficult questions like there are with PAI or Parallel, nor is there is a particularly high burden of proof to meet like with MBT, MBF or SA- you just have to understand the argument and find the choice that weakens it, if even a tiny, tiny amount, and the test writers can be real jerks about it sometimes lmao