Identifying scope/relevance

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  Accounts Playable Live Sage ⭐

  November 2015 edited November 2015 3107 karma

  I've certainly not conquered this problem, but I've gotten a lot better at getting rid of answer choice, so I'll give my 2 cents.
  
  I think identifying answer choices as out of scope is simplifying it too much. In other words, the correct answer is 100% correct and the wrong answers are 100% wrong, so you can almost always justify a wrong answer choice as being in this "out of scope" world. But, I think you are selling yourself short because understanding why it is out of scope is more important than just figuring out that it is out of scope. Instead, ask yourself a few different questions:
  
  1.) Does this answer choice matter? For example, if the question passage is only talking about a study about kids with ADD (PT 51.1.8, I think), answer choices that talk about kids in general don't matter since the passage is limiting itself to only kids with ADD. So, it is true to say that the wrong answer choices are out of scope, but a clearer reason to articulate would be "this answer choice is wrong because some fact about kids in general may not be representative of kids with ADD."
  
  2.) This leads to a few more question you should always ask: what are the assumptions that are needed in order to make the argument better or worse (depending on the question type)? From there, think about the answer choices. Does this answer choice address the assumptions the argument is making? What assumptions does this answer choice need in order to make it correct?
  
  Back to the kids with ADD problem, you would have to assume that an answer choice talking about something that applies to kids in general transfers down to a subset of kids in general: kids with ADD; this seems like a suspect assumption (it sort of mirrors a whole to part flaw). The harder to see correct answer choices are harder because the assumptions they need might actually be pretty bad assumptions/might not make the argument completely valid, but they are "less bad" or less dubious than the assumptions in the wrong answer choices.
• badgalriri Alum Member

  November 2015 316 karma

  @"Accounts Playable" thank you! that's really helpful - I'll try to think about if the AC affects the stimulus rather than just considering scope. I guess in your example, I wouldn't have seen that as out of scope since the kids with ADD fall under the general category of kids so maybe it applies, but now I can see that that's just me helping the AC