LSAT 144 – Section 4 – Question 21

LSAT 144 - Section 4 - Question 21

October 2015

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Question
QuickView		 Type Tags Answer
Choices		 Curve Question
Difficulty		 Psg/Game/S
Difficulty		 Explanation
PT144 S4 Q21
+LR
Weaken +Weak
Causal Reasoning +CausR
Sampling +Smpl
A
3%
159
B
27%
165
C
47%
166
D
14%
158
E
10%
161
152
166
180
 +Hardest 147.675 +SubsectionMedium

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At a large elementary school researchers studied a small group of children who successfully completed an experimental program in which they learned to play chess. The study found that most of the children who completed the program soon showed a significant increase in achievement levels in all of their schoolwork. Thus, it is likely that the reasoning power and spatial intuition exercised in chess-playing also contribute to achievement in many other areas of intellectual activity.

Summarize Argument: Phenomenon-Hypothesis
The author concludes that the reasoning power and spatial intuition exercised in chess-playing likely can cause improvement in other intellectual activities. This is based on a study of a group of children who completed a program involving learning how to play chess. Most of the children who completed the program showed a large increase in schoolwork achievement.

Notable Assumptions
The author assumes that the students’ chess-playing causally contributed to their improved schoolwork achievement. The author also assumes a particular causal mechanism — that it was the reasoning power and spatial intuition exercised by chess that improved the children’s schoolwork achievement.

A
Some students who did not participate in the chess program had learned to play chess at home.
And did these students experience an improvement in schoolwork achievement? If we don’t know this, (A) has no impact.
B
Those children who began the program but who did not successfully complete it had lower preprogram levels of achievement than did those who eventually did successfully complete the program.
Pre-program levels of achievement are irrelevant, since the author never compared the absolute achievement levels of the students who completed the program to those of the students who didn’t. We still know the program-completers increased their achievement after the program.
C
Many of the children who completed the program subsequently sought membership on a school chess team that required a high grade average for membership.
This suggests a potential alternate hypothesis for the increase in achievement levels observed in the study. If many of the children wanted to join a team that required a high grade average, that could have motivated these students to do better on their schoolwork.
D
Some students who did not participate in the chess program participated instead in after-school study sessions that helped them reach much higher levels of achievement in the year after they attended the sessions.
The author never assumed that chess is the only activity that can improve student achievement. And, since we have no reason to think that the students who completed the chess program attended the sessions described in (D), this answer has no impact.
E
At least some of the students who did not successfully complete the program were nevertheless more talented chess players than some of the students who did complete the program.
We don’t know whether the students described in (E) experienced an increase in achievement levels. In addition, varyling levels of chess talent don’t necessarily impact the level of reasoning power or spatial intuition exercised during chess.

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LSAT PrepTest 144 Explanations

Section 1 - Reading Comprehension

Section 2 - Logical Reasoning

Section 3 - Logical Reasoning

Section 4 - Logical Reasoning

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