PT8.S1.Q25 - Great medieval universities

Taosage17

I tend to struggle with parallel flaw questions.. I was so confused on this question because I was focused on matching up the negatives.

Great medieval universities ---> /administrators
/administrators ---> longevity

I chose A, even though I didn't love it. I ruled out B because that answer choice said that we should also get a computer to be successful, but I thought the answer choice would have to recommend NOT having something, like the stimulus.

Is my thinking incorrect here? With parallel questions, do the negatives/positives not always match up? I guess instead I should have thought of "no administrators" as "a certain characteristic that helps longevity" rather than "not A," right?

And is A wrong because the point of the stimulus isn't that just that a certain characteristic is not necessary for the ideal outcome, but rather that characteristic SHOULD be adopted BECAUSE it is the reason for the ideal outcome? The author is mistakenly assuming that the lack of administrators was necessary/responsible for the longevity of great medieval universities?

Thanks!!

canihazJD

So if you go with conditional logic, from the stimulus I got:

/administrators → successful
administrators → /successful
so, /administrators

A gives you something like:

/jet engines → fly
so not (fly → jet engines) or (fly ←some→ /jet engines)

Note: this appears to be valid, in which case it's definitely not our answer.

B matches:

computer → published
/computer → /published
so computer

Quick aside:

@Taosage17 said:
I chose A, even though I didn't love it. I ruled out B because that answer choice said that we should also get a computer to be successful, but I thought the answer choice would have to recommend NOT having something, like the stimulus.

A good takeaway here is that an answer is 100% right or 100% wrong. If you think something is wrong with A, you need a good reason to override that to pick it.

Is my thinking incorrect here? With parallel questions, do the negatives/positives not always match up? I guess instead I should have thought of "no administrators" as "a certain characteristic that helps longevity" rather than "not A," right?

Yes, because you could easily alter the terms to match. For instance the way i did it above, you could also go: /without computer and the "slashes" would match. But I think you're getting hung up on diagramming when you don't need to.

And is A wrong because the point of the stimulus isn't that just that a certain characteristic is not necessary for the ideal outcome, but rather that characteristic SHOULD be adopted BECAUSE it is the reason for the ideal outcome? The author is mistakenly assuming that the lack of administrators was necessary/responsible for the longevity of great medieval universities?

Good, so this flaw is called...

Correlation ≠ causation. (A) has attribute (B) and also favorable attribute (C), so we should also have attribute (B) so we can get (C).

So I would approach it like this:

Stim:

Old schools lacked admins and lasted
so we should get rid of admins to last
Assumption: lack of admins cause "and lasted"

AC B:

Novelist used a computer and started getting published
So you should use a computer so you can get published
Assumption: computer causes publication

Read and try to ID the flaw first, then decide if mapping is required. In this case at best it was unnecessary, at worst it made this question harder.