#19 - The proposal to extend clinical trials, which are

[mshaikh]

Hi Dave,

Thanks so much for the lengthy explanation! This question makes complete sense to me now. Also, I feel better knowing that many others found this question tricky like I did. I definitely got tripped up by the word choice but I will keep in mind that the LSAT authors sometimes use words a little more loosely than I would. Also, next time I will follow your strategy and go with the answer choice that seems to answer the question better although it is worded a bit confusingly or is confusing in general, if I feel all the other answer choices are not good. Thanks again!

Best,

Maham

[puppytiff]

I know that few people picked E, but I am not sure why E is wrong, even though I agree that A is a better answer.

E said the proposal rejected was "presumably advanced in good faith", which sounds right because the word "presumably" gives me confidence. **Can I assume every proposal was made in good faith?

E then said the author's statement didn't "acknowledge any such good faith" is basically saying that the proposal may have other benefits but the author didn't acknowledge any of the benefits and went ahead to reject the proposal.

I chose E even though i was skeptical about the phrase "good faith", but it sounds closest to my pre-phrase.

[Adam Tyson]

Hey there puppytiff, thanks for the question! To start with, you have already given the best possible reason for why answer E is not the credited response. The instructions tell us to select the best answer (from among the 5 answer choices given), and you agreed that A is better than E. That's enough right there to reject E with no further hesitation! If A is better, there is no way that E can be the best answer! Once you have made that determination, anything further is at best a fun intellectual exercise (in practice) and at worst a waste of time and effort (if you do it while taking a test).

Now, that said, let's look at why answer E is not the best answer, and in fact doesn't describe a flaw in ANY argument, let alone this one.

Let's assume that the proposal WAS offered in good faith. There's nothing to suggest anything one way or the other about "good faith", so we should definitely NOT make that assumption, but let's do it anyway. Is it a logical flaw to fail to acknowledge that it was made in good faith? Is a counter-argument inherently bad because the author didn't have the courtesy to say "I acknowledge that you are arguing in good faith, but I respectfully disagree with your position"? Not at all! This is a test of cold, hard logic, not of common courtesy or the rules of civility. Logic requires no acknowledgement in order to be sound!

Good faith is meaningless in the structure of the argument, and acknowledging it or not is irrelevant to the soundness of the response to the proposal. E is, therefore, a total loser. While the term "good faith" has it's place in certain legal contexts, like whether an offer to enter into a contract was legitimate or not, you won't encounter that concept much, if at all, on the LSAT, other than as a distraction. Get cold and hard!

[Nicholas Noyes]

Hi M,

Thanks for the question! This one is very tricky, with only around 32% of test takers correctly selecting (A). And, as a reference, answer choice (C) was 22% and answer choice (D) was 27%. When you have three answers with high percentages like that, it tells you two things: this is a hard problem and that students were confused by the right answer (and thus driven to other attractive answers).

First, you are right in that they aren't trying to equate the two in the correct answer, and I think that point is likely what caused problems for you in your first read-through. So, let's first start by reviewing the argument, and then move to (A).

The argument is saying that a common method for testing drugs (clinical trials) should not be used to test surgical procedures because the success of a surgical procedure is always tied to how good the surgeon is. This makes some sense at first glance, because a drug is just that: you take it and it either works or doesn't, and there's no skill involved in taking or administering it. A new surgical procedure though, is performed by a surgeon, and if that surgeon is no good, the procedure would tend to be less successful whereas if the surgeon is brilliant, the procedure would tend to be more successful (or so the argument implies).

Most people the argument and think that it sounds relatively strong, which then causes a bit of concern when they see the Flaw in the Reasoning a question stem. But if you look at my explanation of the stimulus, in the last few lines you can see a potential problem, namely that while the skill of the surgeon might unquestionably play a role in the success of a new procedure, what if some procedures are just inherently good procedure and other are inherently bad? If that were the case, even a bad surgeon could successfully perform the really good procedures whereas a great surgeon might never be able to get a bad procedure to work.

And that is the point being made in (A): what if it's the case that some procedures are just terrible regardless of the skill of the surgeon, and that by instituting clinical trials we could discover that? Basically, the argument forgot that despite the importance of a surgeon's skill, clinical trials have the possibility of showing that some procedures are just bad, and worse than the current approaches. To make a quick and very rough analogy, imagine there was a basketball play you wanted to test out. Even though the skill of the players will have an impact on how well the play works in an actual game, perhaps some plays are just inherently better than others, and because of that they always have a higher chance of success regardless of the quality of the team running the play.

A second confusion with (A) occurs because the test makers used the word "treatment" in the second half of the answer instead of "procedure." "Treatment" as an idea does not have to refer to drugs, and in this case they meant it to refer to the best surgical procedures that are currently in use. In other words, (A) is saying that the clinical trials for surgical procedures might reveal whether the new procedure was worse than the current best procedure. I personally don't think they meant this to be confusing, it was just a test writer was thinking that "treatment" and "procedure" were equivalent (which they can be), and forgot about "drugs" being a treatment as well. I suspect that's the case because the idea in (A) is tricky enough by itself that it doesn't need word games to make it even harder.

Final thoughts for those who were between (A) and any other answer choice: if you are ever down between multiple answers and have ones that you don't like vs ones you don't understand, choose the one you don't understand! For example, in (D), this is an answer that describes something that happened, but it isn't a flaw (they difference described between drugs and procedures is more a commonsense piece of information). So (D) is something that happened but it doesn't describe an error. If you felt (D) was not that great but were unsure about (A), then don't pick (D).

With (C), is that an actual assumption, that they remain unchanged? No, it is not. But here's a second takeaway from this question: in Flaw or Method questions, if an answer claims a certain assumption was made, you can use the Assumption Negation Technique to test whether it really is an assumption. Here, if you said, a surgeon's skill change throughout the surgeon's professional life," would that hurt the argument? No it wouldn't, mainly because the author would say that helps the argument by showing that surgeon skill is having an impact (and, if you assume that for most of a surgeon's life her skills get better due to experience, it helps the argument even more).

Overall, a really great problem to analyze, and you can see why this one is tough. Please let me know if that helps. Thanks!

So A is the correct answer because it is saying that a surgery may not be productive and can potentially be harmful even though the surgeon can have good skills. So the procedure is just bad and has nothing to do with the skills of the argument? This was a difficult question so I do not feel bad about being tripped up by it.

-Nicholas

[Adam Tyson]

That's correct, Nicholas. Answer A is saying that a surgical procedure might prove to be harmful no matter how good the surgeon is, and so a clinical trial might help us learn that. It shows a benefit of clinical trials for surgical procedures that the argument failed to consider.

[caseyh123]

I don't totally understand why answer a is pointing out a flaw in the argument. I understand why it is pointing out a flaw in the general conclusion that we shouldn't do trials on surgeries, but not in the way the argument moved from the premises to the conclusion. it seems kind of irrelevant to me.

I was expecting the flaw to be something along the lines of the surgeons who perform these trials are all super experienced and very rarely make mistakes. I actually read answer A as another reason we shouldn't have these trials, because maybe people are going to die if we have these trials because the procedures tested could just always be deadly (but i suppose that doesn't really make sense because then we could never develop new surgical procedures?)

Anyway my point is that I don't see how answer a addresses the problems in how the argument traveled from the premises to the conclusion

[Frank Peter]

Hi Casey,

The conclusion is really where the action is when we are thinking about flaw in the reasoning. The reason is because it is the claim that is being made by the author - the premises serve to support that claim. Often times there may not be anything inherently flawed about the premises; it is the conclusion that the author draws from those premises that is the problem.

This argument is a pretty good example of that. The premise that supports the conclusion that clinical trials should not be implemented is: "a correctly prescribed drug depends for its effectiveness only on the drug’s composition, whereas the effectiveness of even the most appropriate surgical procedure is transparently related to the skills of the surgeon who uses it." There's nothing on it's face that seems especially problematic about that claim (although I could certainly think of some nuances that the author might consider). The problem is that this is the only evidence that the author uses for the conclusion that clinical trials shouldn't be implemented for surgical procedures.

We have to ask if the author has really considered all aspects of this claim. (A) brings up an issue that undermines the author's conclusion. If newer surgeries have more risk involved, then there may be some merit to subjecting them to clinical trials.

I often find it to be the case that more challenging questions on the LSAT play with our expectations. You might prephrase a flaw that seems obvious, only to have the answer choice bring up a different issue. It is still worthwhile to prephrase because it is a great way to really think through the reasoning in the stimulus, but be prepared to find that certain questions don't always go in the direction we're expecting.

[simonsap]

Stimulus:
Drugs are effective depending on their composition
Surgeries are effective depending on 1) procedure, and 2) skill of surgeon.
Therefore, new procedures should not be tested.

double-edged flaw:
A new procedure could not be easier and require less skill or reduce the error rate, and therefore reliance on skill of surgeon?
Or new procedures should go straight into practice, without being tested. It assumes the procedures are always effective because they are perfect, and that there's no point of testing them because if a surgeon is skilled enough, the procedures will work. What if they prove to be more dangerous, and should not be implemented at all?

The answer choice A) forces the conclusion into the second-side of the flaw. Getting this correctly requires that you create and evaluate the appropriate bridge between the stimulus and the baked in assumption that can collapse either way.

The unnecessary comparison with drugs (because there is no 'x' factor in their effectiveness) is supposed to throw you off. Nasty question.

[madelineunruh01]

Does the correct answer here pass the fact test? I usually rule out answers similar to this one because it is not mentioned in the passage. It's really not even implied- help!

[Jeff Wren]

Hi Madeline,

This is a flaw in the reasoning question, and the correct answer to these questions is often a more abstract description of the logical error underlying the argument. In order to spot the flaw (and prephrase) before looking at the answers, you need to examine the premises and conclusion and ask yourself whether the premises actually prove the conclusion. Sometimes, the flaw is easy spot and classify, while other times it isn't.

In this argument, the flaw is a type of evidence error. Even if surgical skills do vary between surgeons, that doesn't prove that clinical trials of new surgical procedures should not be implemented. There are likely many ways that this potential problem could be dealt with in a clinical trial. For one thing, this variation in skill could be accounted for in the trial or averaged. Perhaps they could compare the individual outcomes of each surgeon (using the new procedure vs. using the old procedure), which would account for the skill level.

This flaw could have been described in several ways. Here, Answer A gets at one of the many related problems in this argument. If a surgical procedure is inherently more harmful, that would likely to be clear from the trial even with variations in surgical ability. In other words, if the new procedure always fails even when used by the best surgeons, then it's not a good procedure and that would be useful information to know (and a good use of the clinical trial).

Be careful with answers that begin with the words "the argument fails to consider." When an argument fails to consider other options or other relevant information that it should have considered, that is a flaw, as it is here. However, often these "fails to consider" answers describe something that is not relevant to the argument and therefore not the flaw.