Principle and Parallel Method Questions

SaraFromOC

Does anyone have any strategies or tricks for these questions? The latter is heavily lawgic based, which helps at times, but I'm still getting more of them wrong than any other question type.

TheDeterminedC

I have a few tips I can share about PM that have helped me out. I'm pretty sure they are straight out of the CC though so you might want to go over those lessons again. Starting off with matching quantifiers is a pretty simple and quick method to eliminate one or two answers when they appear in the argument. If the stimulus says "most" and concludes "some," then the premise and conclusion must allude somehow to the correct quantity or else it's wrong. Another way is to match the strength of the conclusion. Whether it's probably, inevitable, must, maybe, a conditional statement, sometimes, ect; that must translate into the answer in a similar way or else it too is wrong. Additionally, the logic itself can be abstracted out and used as a mold for the answers. If the stimulus states A & B ---> C then the answer must be the same form. Apart from matching though, there is a big portion of anticipation that is an extremely helpful tool to use on this question type. Just like SA, we know exactly what each premise ought to say and how they are used to support the conclusion. So use this anticipation to your advantage.

I'm currently in the process of building my intuitive understanding of the argument and trying to find a match for it without specifically doing all these steps consciously. The method doesn't pay off much on simple PM questions but the really complex argument structures that are hard to translate into our "lawgic" is where the strength lies. I would imagine this method would be more fitting for answering hard PM questions when the test goes digital soon as well, since I think we will be unable to write on the July test (though I'm not 100% sure about this).