#11 - A university professor researching sleep disorders

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Must Be True. The correct answer choice is (A).

A university professor feels pretty out of it when lecturing after working late into the night, but her students generally can't seem to tell those lectures from the professor's other lectures. This might suggest one of three things to us: 1) the professor is just generally a bad lecturer, so that even when she is feeling sharp she still comes off as unfocused and humorless, and the difference on those certain days is just in how she feels and has no impact on how she is actually doing; 2) the professor's performance on those days actually fine, and it's just her own assessment of her performance that is affected; or 3) the students are paying so little attention that while there are differences in her performance on those days, they don't pick up on them. Any of these would be a fine prephrase, and the first two are just two versions of the same idea, which is that the professor's subjective judgment about how she is doing on those days relative to other days is not matched by the reality of the situation.

Answer choice (A): This is the correct answer choice. This looks a lot like the idea discussed above, that the professor's feelings about how she was doing were not matched by what students actually observed. She felt like she was doing badly, but the problems she felt were occurring were not obvious to others.

Answer choice (B): A very strong statement that no one can determine something, and very hard to support based on these facts. Was the professor correct, or were the students? Could some other person have made a better determination, like a colleague or behavioral psychologist? We cannot know who is the best one to evaluate the professor's behavior.

Answer choice (C): We can't know what effect sleep deprivation has on anyone, including the professor, so there is no way to make any comparison. Maybe the professor's performance was awful, and the students just didn't notice?

Answer choice (D): With no information provided in the stimulus about the effects of extended sleep deprivation, there is no way we can select this answer choice as being supported by it. The trouble with this answer is that it seems completely reasonable, and is probably true. But we cannot select answers based on that sort of outside information - we must rely exclusively on what the stimulus told us.

Answer choice (E): This answer is far too broad - do we know anything about university students in a lecture generally, or do we only know about the students in this professor's class? Also, do we know whether these students are correct, that the professor is actually doing just as well on her sleep-deprived days as on others, or could they be wrong and just not very keen observers? We have no way of knowing even that much, so there is no evidence that any students are any good at assessing human behavior.

[mjb514]

Can you please explain this question entirely. Also, I had a hard time realizing if this was a strengthen or a must be true.

[Jennifer Janowsky]

Hey mjb514!

This is a Must Be True question, which you can spot by "Which one of the following statements is most strongly supported" wording in the question stem. A Strengthen question would ask which of the answer choices helps the stimulus, instead of which answer choice would be supported by the stimulus.

We can start out by summarizing the question as follows: A sleep researcher and professor occasionally taught after pulling all nighters, and felt this was difficult to do: she reported struggling to teach. However, after several weeks, she asked her students to guess which nights these were and they were unable to.

What Must Be True based on this info? With this said, it seems that perhaps the effects of deprivation are not as pronounced as the teacher imagined, or perhaps that students are not observant enough to notice them. We can prephrase a few possibilities here. Let's move on to the answer choices.

(A) This is the correct answer and closest to our prephrase: it seems that the professor must have imagined the effects of her all nighters to be more severe than reality.

(B) This isn't an argument that the stimulus supports because it is too extreme in stating "no one." The argument never specifies that the study could only be done by the person who is sleep deprived, and perhaps there is some expert would could better assess the overall effects.

(C) Others' job performance is an extra element here that doesn't seem to be relevant. Therefore, this doesn't necessarily follow from the stimulus.

(D) They don't study extended sleep deprivation in this case, and therefore it seems to be a new element that isn't directly relevant. Therefore, this doesn't necessarily follow from the stimulus.

(E) This is actually an opposite answer--it seems instead that students may not be observant. This makes this answer a tricky choice, but it is not the correct choice.

Hopefully that helps!

[Khodi7531]

So I was between B and A and chose B. I liked A...and B's "no one" was extreme for me. However, I know that this question is a MSS and not a MBT (I see it was differentiated in this post, but in LR there is and MSS question can get away with stronger than normal language).


With that being said, I chose B because I thought a MSS can say that. It' snot my favorite in anyway and I did struggle but just trying to get some consistency on why to get rid of B. Because MSS questions can support strong language - which is why, in my opinion, are harder than MBT's.

[Adam Tyson]

Even a Most Strongly Supported answer must be supported by the stimulus, khodi! Think of this particular variant on Must Be True as a reverse-Strengthen question, where the stimulus strengthens the answer choice. Does the stimulus here strengthen the claim that the professor is doing better at assessing her performance than the students are? Or is it possible that her judgment is impaired and that she is doing better than she thinks she is, with the students being the better judges? I don't think we can tell. Also, while stronger answers might be more acceptable in a MSS answer than a MBT answer, they still can't be stronger than the evidence that supports them, and answer B is extremely strong. No one? All we looked at was the professor and the students in her lectures. There are lots of other people who might be better judges! Other professors, her friends and family might notice something, doctors researching the effects of sleep deprivation, etc.

Make sure that your answer choice follows from the facts in the stimulus and does not go too far afield, and that is not stronger than the evidence supports.

[T.B.Justin]

My first go around with this question, I correctly identified the 4 losers and 1 winner.

On the second attempt, I did the complete opposite and identified (E) as the winner.

I read answer choice (E), as follows, Some university students in a lecture audience tend to be astute observers of human behavior.

I have been told that if the test makers do not explicitly state "all", it is ok to use "some."

If some students were able to correctly identify the lectures without sleep, I think that is likely those university students are astute observers of human behaviors, or else, how would they correctly identify those lectures. I suppose its reasonable to think that only a few correctly identified those lectures based on chance.

My question is to the way I read the answer choice, and my reasoning.

[Dave Killoran]

Hey T,

Interesting, I read this a bit differently, so let's discuss that.

For me, I read "university students in a lecture" as the group, since that's a collective reference. From there, the key was the "tend," which turned the statement probabilistic: "University students in a lecture audience tend to be..." That suggested to me that on the whole, the majority are astute observers, which I immediately dismissed.

The general reduction to "some" is one that typically works, but I don't believe it's typically paired with a collective reference, but more along partial lines such as, "There are university students..." That phrasing would suggest "some" to me immediately.

To get deeper into this, we might want to look at some exact phrasings from questions, so if I see something pop up, I'll add it here, and you should feel free to do the same!

Hopefully, that's some help in the meantime though!

[T.B.Justin]

Ok, so "tend to" makes reference to the group of students in the class and to the majority of them being astute.

That "tend to" refers to probabilistic is a new idea to me. Up until this point, I have read with the purpose of when I see "tend to" I am thinking causality.

[Dave Killoran]

Right, a tendency typically means that you do it more often than not, so that's the probabilistic idea in force here. It's like saying the majority of time it happens.

"Tend to" doesn't have much force in it's language—it's more like an observation of how things are as opposed to an assessment of what is making things happen—so my first thought is usually about it meaning "more than half." That doesn't mean there can't be situations where it's causal though!