#1 - Student: My university recently enacted new penalties

[Administrator]

Please post your questions below!

[lyn]

I don't understand why D is the correct answer. I chose C because I felt it pointed out the distinction between drinking on-campus and drinking in the Student housing. The author is arguing that the rules for student housing drinking will be ineffective because the rules for on-campus drinking have been ineffective. If student preferred drinking on the student residence, then these new penalties are likely to be more effective because they are more targeted and deal directly with drinking on residence rather than general on-campus drinking. (The students could have easily flouted the general on-campus drinking laws by preferring to drink in the student housing after class or on weekends or something.)

D just doesn't seem strong enough to be a correct answer. If the University has tried to curb on campus drinking many times in the past, I imagine they would have tried different methods, so the fact that they're trying another different method doesn't indicate that this new method will be more successful. If, according to the author, the different methods they have tried in the past have been unsuccessful, isn't he correct to assume that these new rules will be unsuccessful too? if D had specified a difference in the new rules vs the old rules then I would agree that It would be the correct answer. But the vague explanation of "the rules are different now" just doesn't cut it for me. How are they different from the other many previous attempts?

[Adam Tyson]

The flaw in this question is what we call a "Time Shift," lyn, and it is based on the illogical and unsupportable idea that what has happened in the past must necessarily continue to happen. It's "this is what has always been true, so it must be true now and in the future." Recognizing that past results are no guarantee of future results, we should be looking for some answer that points out that things could change. This time could be different. That's what answer D is doing - telling us that this time, the rules could be different. And not just different, but "relevantly different," meaning the difference may matter. The author has failed to consider that.

What students prefer or do not prefer isn't relevant to this argument. Maybe most students prefer to drink off-campus - so what? The question is just whether the new penalties will be more effective than the old ones at curbing whatever amount of on-campus drinking is going on, no matter what anyone would prefer to be doing. At 18, I would have preferred going to a bar than drinking warm, cheap beer in my dorm room, but I didn't have a good enough fake ID to do that, so the dorm room was where I did that. Will the new penalties do a better job of stopping me than the old ones? Maybe, maybe not. But the failure of the old penalties has no bearing on whether the new ones will work, especially if the new ones are "relevantly different" from the old ones.

You said "I imagine they would have tried different methods," but you should NOT imagine any such thing, because the stimulus says nothing to support that assumption. In any event, even if they had tried many different methods and had always failed, that still says nothing about whether the new rules will work or not. The flaw is only that the author assumed that past results are proof positive that the new attempts are bound to fail, and failing to consider the possibility of a relevant difference this time around.

One last thing: we are not looking to prove the author is wrong. We are only looking to point out why their argument is not valid. Whether the new penalties will actually have any differences, and whether those differences will lead to different results, isn't relevant to our analysis of the argument. It's just about pointing out why their premises do not support their conclusion.