Relative Support: An Observation/Potential New Trend

Cant Get Right

Props to the BR Group on this, I really kinda just stole this observation from those guys!

So there are two questions in PT 78 where it really feels like the LSAT is screwing with us and potentially introducing a new tendency on the level of strength of right answer choices: Section 1 Question 6 and Section 3 Question 7. On both of these, the correct answers are really awful and require significant logical leaps and assumptions. I've been confidently and correctly eliminating answers like these for a long time now: It's the exact type of argument that the LSAT has really trained me to not be okay with, so they really threw me off. Before, it always seemed like the relative "most strongly" phrasing was more a caution for if anyone challenged a question or something. But on the current test, it seems they are actually playing around with the idea of relative strength among answer choices. So if you go through answer choices and eliminate all of them with absolute confidence like I did on these, don't panic. Pick the least bad answer, and don't let it throw you off your game.

Anyone run into any other examples of these or notice any other developing trends?

danielznelson

I could be way off on this, but RC seems to do stuff like this even more often and more so as the test grows. I've been getting a lot of answers wrong because I didn't select a not-so-great RC answer choice.

Obviously, the key is to be able to confidently eliminate so you're left with only one that makes any semblance of sense.

BinghamtonDave

Thank you for making this thread! 78-3-7 is basically everything we have been taught not to even suggest in a correct answer choice.

blah170blah

I've also noticed I have to check back to the stimulus way more often. Typically, there's one word that seems innocuous on a first read but makes an answer choice completely untrue.

Daniel.Sieradzki

Thank you for making this thread, @"Cant Get Right". One of the things I noticed on the PT 78 questions is that the LSAT writers are taking advantage of our knowledge of flaws.

We are taught to be very wary of hasty generalizations and causation/correlation flaws. Because of all the tests we take, we constantly reinforce the idea that they are terrible arguments. While this is certainly true, there is a specific reason why they are bad. They are not bad because they lack any support. They are bad because the support is insufficient to justify the conclusion. A correlation is support for a causation and a single example is support for a generalization. However, by themselves they are lousy support.

This brings me to my main point. For a Most Strongly Supported question, a correlation does support a causation and a single positive example does support a positive generalization. It is awful support, but it is still support. I will illustrate this with a made-up question:

"There are an estimated one million swans in the world. Jack visits his local park, where he finds 10 swans. All 10 swans are black."

The above statements, if true, most strongly support which of the following statements:

A. Swans enjoy parks
B. Some swans are white
C. All swans are black
D. Some parks do not have swans
E. Parks are made better by having swans

I believe a case could be made for C being the right answer. We have examined 10 swans and all of them are black. This is the start of a proof by exhaustion. So far we have only tested 10 swans, but we are currently 10 for 10 on black swans. It would be insane to conclude that all one million swans are black based on a sample of 10. However, it is being supported.

The other answers I generated are all very crappy. A and E require way too many assumptions and we were given no information about them. B and D also have no support. Thus, C is the only answer supported (extremely weakly, but still supported) and would be the right answer.

I am not sure if this illustrates the issue in the newest tests. However, I hope it still illustrates the point that we could see a flaw answer in a most strongly supported question. This is because flawed conclusions are supported, just not well enough.

Cant Get Right

Yeah, I think that is really well said @Daniel.Sieradzki . Mr. Popper would of course be very unhappy with your example, but I think he'd be compelled to agree that C would have to be the correct answer.

Seriousbird

Do you guys see this shift in parallel reasoning questions on the newer tests also? Still going through the curriculum and curious.

Cant Get Right

@sweetsecret , I think parallel is an inherently more straight forward question type. If they start getting into what is the "most parallel" and then give us arguments that are all more or less "parallel" that opens the door on some places the LSAT really doesn't want to go. That's like some "Stranger Things" shit right there. (Great show for anyone who hasn't watched it yet!) Parallel is an absolute concept: If two lines aren't parallel they will intersect, so things are either parallel or they aren't. I do seem to recall one from way back where there was something weird going on, but it was a total anomaly and not something I'd worry much about.

Parallels are really interesting question types. Starting out, they are super intimidating. I used to skip them automatically without even reading the stimulus. As you get better though, they really start to lose their teeth. They can, of course, be made difficult; but at this point I'd almost prefer a 5 star parallel to a 5 star strengthen/weaken or something like that.

Seriousbird

@"Cant Get Right" thanks for the input, yeah that's what I was thinking. However, when I start doing the drill sets (from Cambridge), I think I am going to take JY's advice and diagram/understand the arguments of all the answer choices to familiarize myself and understand the material better, so I can become fast at this!

Cant Get Right

@sweetsecret said:
diagram/understand the arguments of all the answer choices to familiarize myself and understand the material better

Absolutely. That's how you do it.

Sprinkles

Ugh, this thread scares me. Thanks Josh

Cant Get Right

Theodore Roosevelt once said: We have nothing to be scared of except being scared itself and spiders.


Actually I think future incarnations of these guys are going to be really easy now that I know about them. Tricky for sure, but easily manageable. I'd just never seen anything like them before so kinda got blindsided.

desire2learn

Thank you so much for this thread! I just finished PT 74 and felt like there were about 4-5 questions I missed that were just AWFUL support. They felt like questions that we have been trained to pick up on as being bad and then the poor support/bad option was the correct answer. I was very frustrated and now am trying to adjust my calibrations for such questions. Most of them were weakening, strengthening, or MSS I believe but even one of the fill in the blank questions put forth a TERRIBLE argument (that was the correct answer of course). So frustrating. Anyway, use them to learn and don't expect "good" answers but be ready to find the "least piece of garbage" answer through elimination (although even that doesn't work great sometimes).

cacrv567

What were you guys wavering between in PT78 S1 Q6? I think the question that was the most WTF for me was S3 Q23.

lol but I'm nervous now bc I don't know if I'm seeing the overall trend - WHAT ELSE AM I MISSING?!

Cant Get Right

@cacrv567 , perhaps trend wasn't quite the right word, it's almost more like a new question type. On 78.1.6, I eliminated everything, so wasn't really wavering between anything. When I came back to it at the end, I eliminated everything again, lol. When I came back to it at the very end, I think I decided to randomly guess between B and C.

3.23 was definitely one of the tougher questions on the test. I think I finally tackled this one by going with an extreme. You can always assign extreme values to unknown variables and see how that affects things. So imagine two scenarios- one where the lot in question has 10,000 parking spaces for 1 employee and another where the lot has 1 parking space for 10,000 employees. Knowing which scenario we're in really clarifies whether the conclusion is valid or not, and answer choice C let's us do just that.