All of the answer choices seemed shitty because none of them resembled my prephrase. This question showed me that even when you prephrase, you still have to approach these questions through POE. This is how I'd do it next time:

[A]: Discusses laws that prohibit or permit actions. This is out of scope!

[B]: Hmm... this is devaluing overly lenient punishment, which is kind of what our stimulus is warning against... keep for now.

[C]: Out of scope: we're not discussing legal permissibility of anything

[D]: Out of scope: the question of using motives as a mitigating factor is not a policy question. We're not dreaming up a new law.

[E]: I could see how a mitigating punishment based on motives could be construed as a "legal system," but the stimulus isn't saying anything about "disastrous consequences" resulting.

So I guess I'd go with B! It's the least BAD.

Didn't realize that 22(A) simply switched "front-to-back" to "top-to-bottom." The testmakers are nefarioussss for that trick!!! >:(

D is so tricky! It would be right if you just used "takes for granted" instead of "overlooks the possibility."

C was tempting, but after a closer reading it's descriptively inaccurate. The stimulus is not taking other people's argument for granted as true. It's saying "IF" their statements are true, then this would happen.

Hi! Just so I understand you correctly, you mean that we can safely assume that the "medical treatment the patient is receiving" applies to alternative medicine just because the alternative medicine could be a form of medical treatment that a patient receives?

In choosing D, were you thinking about it this way: "A patient's belief in the medical treatment they're receiving can have these bodily effects. Alternative medicine is a form of medical treatment. So if a patient believes in the alternative medicine they're receiving, then the natural painkillers/allergic reactions/healing can result, and therefore alternative medicine could have an effect."

Thank you for your thorough response!

Here’s how I thought about it. Many weaken questions are asking you to reconcile two premises. This question is a great example.

The author is saying that that the economists are wrong. Why? Because the survey evidence seemingly refutes the economists’ assertion. To weaken the argument, you just need to find an AC which shows how the survey evidence could be compatible with the economists’ statements.

C does this. If jobs that pay the same salary have different financial benefits (free food, quarterly bonuses, stock options) then people surveyed might not name salary itself as the most desirable feature of a job, but could be motivated by the total financial reward (which includes salary as well as those other rewards).

B doesn’t reconcile the two statements. In many surveys, people say they prefer a higher wage job. Okay? That doesn’t reconcile the two premises that the author says are incompatible.

I saw E and thought, “Great! Maybe the biomarkers in the petroleum are from the fossilized remains of plants, which then became carbon deposits. So both groups of scientists are partially right.” But that reasoning actually further refutes the renegade scientists’ argument, by suggesting that living material → carbon deposits → petroleum. The renegade scientists explicitly hold that petroleum was NOT formed by living material. This AC is suggesting that it could have been. Moreover, if we look at the renegade argument closely, they’re saying that petroleum formed from carbon deposits that date from the formation of the earth, long before plants existed. So either way, AC E is out of scope. It’s referring to carbon deposits that the renegade scientists are not.

This is how I reached the correct answer:

Anita's conclusion: Traditional journalistic ethics (TJE) is not clear, adequate, and essentially correct for most ethical dilemmas.

Anita's premise: TJE doesn't provide guidance for situations where a journalist is not sure whether or not the information is newsworthy.

Analysis: I originally thought, what if Anita's premise is true, but these situations only make up a very small portion of ethical dilemmas? Then we can't say that her conclusion follows for most ethical dilemmas. The correct answer got at a different issue.

[A] is right because:

Marcus supports his claim by referencing what TJE would say about newsworthy information. Then Anita comes in and says, "what about information that isn't necessarily newsworthy?" But from Marcus's claim, we only know about applying TJE to newsworthy information. What if non-newsworthy information isn't even eligible for consideration under journalistic ethics? Anita is assuming that her example is a counterexample against TJE being clear/adequate/correct for most dilemmas. But what if her example doesn't even count as a dilemma? Then it's irrelevant and out of scope for the claim about TJE. For her claim to follow, we have to assume that her example is a relevant dilemma for TJE to address.

[D] is wrong because it doesn't have to be true for Anita's conclusion to follow. What if there is a possible system of ethics that accounts for every possible ethical dilemma? Could Anita's claim about TJE still follow? Yes.

[E] is too strong. Maybe there is an adequate system of journalistic ethics that does provide guidance for every case. But Anita is saying that TJE specifically isn't clear/adequate/correct for most dilemmas. But the "professional decision" part is certainly also a red flag, because what does that even mean...?

I was SO close to choosing AC B. From our perspective as shrewd LSAT students, indeed, there is no evidence that the quality of plumbing instruction has decreased! But that's because after doing a lot of these questions, I intuitively know they're citing bad evidence. It’s not because the argument itself treated lack of evidence as conclusive evidence. The LSAT writers are so good at what they do... -_-

How I simplified it in my wrong answer journal...

If A causes B, then B ->C. But C didn’t happen this one time, so therefore A NEVER causes B.

But what if there are multiple causes of B? And what if in this instance we observed, A wasn’t the cause? Couldn’t A then be the cause for other instances that we haven't observed yet? There can be multiple causes for the same effect, and each of those causes might have its own necessary conditions.

SA: every instance of effect B happening is because of one cause. Then, we know that there isn’t this possibility that A is the cause for some instances while X is the cause for the instances where B happened but C didn’t.