@natemanwell1617 said:

@graycuevas13333 said:

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 (@natemanwell1617) 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

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.

I think the reason A is wrong is because of 2nd to last sentence's precise assertion: it's "not fair" for those who have worked 40 or more years to deprive others of opportunities. This implicitly supports the minor conclusion of "unacceptable outcomes" by saying that in a world in which there is no mandatory retirement, there will less "fairness" by this standard, compared to a world in which there is.

We don't need A) "anyone" who has worked 40 years is 65 y/o to be true, because in a world in which there is just one worker who has worked 40 years and is 65 y/o, having mandatory retirement would force that one person to retire, thus stopping that one person from depriving others of opportunities and making the world more "fair" by the metric implicitly established by the 2nd to last sentence.

Amending A) from "anyone" to "at least one person" would fix this I think, and make A) a necessary assumption, but because it says "anyone" and thus implies "all" people with 40 years experience are at least 65 y/o, A) is too strong to be necessary. We don't care how much fairer the world with mandatory retirement is compared to the world without it; it just needs to be more fair by the absolute smallest possible margin, which in this case is one retiree who otherwise would not have retired.

deleted