FMOR Manhattan

mc_meatt

For Flawed Method of Reasoning section, Manhattan LR only talks about "mismatch between premises and conclusion" and "causation" whereas 7sage and Powerscore talk about many different types of recurring flaws.

I was just wandering why Manhattan chose to do so. Anybody has an idea?

Jonathan Wang

As a disclaimer, I obviously have no actual insight into why Manhattan or PowerScore do what they do. This is my speculation:

If I had to guess, I'd bet it's centered around having a more holistic theoretical approach ("identify the mismatch, then figure out why that's not OK") versus having an explicit, enumerated list of flaws to memorize and run through checklist-style ("look for THESE mismatches, so that if you recognize one you've already figured it out").

Both approaches have pros and cons, and even PS and 7Sage exist along a spectrum (Mike Kim's LSAT Trainer only broadly categorizes flaws into three major pools, and I've seen other non-commercial methods have long lists of 30, 40, even 50 flaws for students to memorize). These decisions are hard because you have to figure out what balance to strike. Enumerated lists can be (and often are) extremely detrimental to what I'll call 'true' progress (defined as actual articulable understanding, not just pure pattern recognition), but so can not having labels to put on concepts at all.

Nobody can prepare you for every variation on every question you'll ever see, so in my view it's just a tradeoff between how much focus you put on abstract theory in order to capture as many unexpected/nonstandard cases as possible versus what specifics you can just force the student to memorize to make certain cases slam dunks.