Posting on Behalf of a 7Sage User: Circular Reasoning Argument

Sam - Student Service

[I am posting on behalf of a 7Sage user. Please feel free to leave your comments below. Thank you for your help!]

What is an example of a circular reasoning argument? Additionally, I typically have started approaching AC's with the mentality of what works best for the stimulus/question. The AC may be itself far from perfect/poorly written, but that may be an LSAT writer trap to deter us from picking the correct one. On the LSAT an AC is correct if out of all the other options, it best does the thing the question is asking for. Can you let me know if this line of thinking is correct for assessing LR and RC answer choices? #help

sucralosedaddy

PT17 S3 Q20
PT6 S3 Q8
PT24 S2 Q8
PT49 S2 Q23
PT15 S2 Q20
PT71 S3 Q20 (interesting AC, but the stim itself if circular)

No this is a bad approach, the ACs are 99.999% logically sound, so it's not really "what works best", it's objectively the best.

Although the question stem's say "which is the most accurately..." "..the most vulnerable..." "...most helps..." one AC is objectively correct and the four other ACs are objectively wrong.

https://7sage.com/which-lsat-questions-have-two-right-answers/

Some of the language they (the LSAT writers) may use is convoluted in a sense that you need to "push" it back into the stimulus or its verbose to throw you off (this will be the case some higher level difficulty questions). The answer may seem poor but at its core is the only possible answer.

[side note] An example of this that comes to mind is on argument part questions, say you've identified the part of the argument as the sub-conclusion. In the ACs instead of saying "this is the sub-conclusion" they will say "this is a statement used to support the conclusion that XYZ and is supported by the statement ABC". (you have to push up the information in the AC to the stimulus and is intentionally verbose to throw you off).

RC is different but follows the same general guidelines, in MSS questions you technically choose the "best supported answer" but in follows that it really is the only AC that's supported by the passage and the others are wrong.