Finding The Assumption

texvd1988

I have been doing the CC and have stumbled a bit on the strengthen portion of things. Once I hit the 3 star questions, I was getting about 60 percent correct, which is not at all where I want to be. I realize that much of my problem stems from the inability to find that assumption to bridge the gap between premise and conclusion. Is there anything you guys do that helps in establishing this bridge? I know that you will never necessarily find the bridge perfectly, but I would at least like to get better at it to have a greater chance.

Thank you.

Toxoplasmosis

Interesting question that really made me think about me thought process for these questions! I suppose the way I go about it is by eliminating answer choices that do not add depth to the premise conclusion relationship. i.e as I'm going through AC's I am saying to myself "nope this doesn't do anything to the argument, wrong, nope this actually weakens the argument, wrong" etc. I think the main difference in what I am trying to describe and what you are describing in the OP is that I don't read with the purpose of finding a gap for strengthening questions. I read willing to take the stimulus at face value (ie the author says sleeping less will make you sick more often, let's find the answer choice that would make this relationship more likely to be true even if there not an obvious gap in the premise/conclusion). It may be worthwhile to review some main point/argument part material because I think the critical skill in both strengthening and weakening questions is to be able to reliably identify parts of arguments and the role they play in the overall support structure.

legal_name

If I understand correctly, you mean you've been having trouble with strengthening questions in LR?
It's somewhat a two part process. You have to find possible assumptions, yes, but you also have to ensure those assumptions cannot be made by blocking them with an answer choice and hence strengthening the relationship between premise and conclusion.

If you mean sufficient assumptions alone, they generally look like:

A
___
B

To bridge them, you simply have to show that A (fill it in with existing premise) can lead to B (fill it in with existing conclusion). Quite literally A ->B. Pay attention to any mismatch between terms in premise and conclusion - they are sometimes filled in by a sufficient assumption.

I hope I answered your question? Please let me know if I misunderstood it.

tanes256

@vduran1988 check out the webinar on strengthen and weaken questions, if you haven't already. It hits on what @legal_name is referring to by blocking alternatives. The argument could be causation/correlation, argument by analogy or phenomenon/hypothesis related. Once you can recognize this in the argument it'll help you with POE.

texvd1988

Thank you for your help, guys. Just looking over some of this information it seems like it may be better to read answer choices and see which ones do a better job of weakening the link between a premise/ conclusion in weaken questions or a stronger link between the two in strengthen questions.

I got tripped up by the part of the strengthen section where we had to try and form an assumption.
Weaken was a lot easier for me than strengthen for some reason. I need some more practice on it.

combsni

Try the negation technique! Turn it into a weaken question!

Cant Get Right

Strengthen/Weaken questions have more potential than any other question type to be the hardest questions on the LSAT. So as you increase in difficulty with these, they do get really hard. An answer choice that strengthens the argument by 1% is going to be incredibly unattractive. On the more challenging of these, it often does become important to consider the answer choices all together. My process follows the same line as @Toxoplasmosis . The range of things that can strengthen/weaken an argument is just too broad to rely on accurately anticipating the answer.

texvd1988

Another question. Apologies for dragging this topic out on my end. I am finishing up the CC on Sufficient assumption and Pseudo SA. The pattern of

A
a-b
___________
b

works extremely well for SA and PSA as most of you know. Now, we can also use it on strengthening questions when conditional statements are involved. I have found that just writing out the A
____
B
forms makes the entire game easier for me as a whole. Do any of you guys use this technique on strengthen/ weaken or should I get used to doing things without since it is time consuming? I feel like it drags the premise/ conclusion in my head and keeps them relevant. Especially for the difficult questions.