#3 - Hospital patients generally have lower infection

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Here we go with another Resolve the Paradox question, the second in this section. We need to find the cause for Woodville's hospital having infection rates and lengths of stay that match those of other nearby hospitals, even though Woodville uses only semiprivate rooms, which we are told are more conducive to high infection rates and longer stays. The stimulus also tells us that Woodville and the other hospitals treat similar patients, eliminating what would have been an easy solution to the mystery. We need something else to solve this puzzle, some cause for better-than-expected outcomes at Woodville or, perhaps, worse-than-expected outcomes at the other hospitals.

Answer A: This one deepens the mystery further by having overlapping staff members at Woodville and the other hospitals. That means the unexpected outcomes cannot be attributed to the skill, or lack thereof, of the staffs. The type of room should still lead to different outcomes.

Answer B: This answer tells us about a big difference between Woodville and the others, but not a helpful difference. Don't help this answer any by adding imagined outside info like "and older hospitals probably had better ventilation or thicker walls or some other characteristic that helps reduce infection rates." Of course, if you imagine that older hospitals are automatically worse than newer ones, as many students may be tempted to do, that would make our paradox even more puzzling, because you would expect much worse outcomes at the older Woodville hospital! Differences do not typically help resolve paradoxes about things that are unexpectedly similar. We need to find what makes all these hospitals similar to each other.

Answer C: If this is true (and it sure sounds reasonable), then we would have a better understanding of why infection rates might be higher in semiprivate rooms than in private ones. That does not, however, do anything to explain why Woodville's hospital does not experience those higher rates of infection. We are still left wondering about the unexpected result.

Answer D: This is the correct answer. Now we have a cause for Woodville being similar to the other hospitals despite the difference in room configurations. If Woodville uses semiprivate rooms as if they were private rooms, then they would be similar to the other hospitals in the most crucial way, the way that correlates with lower infection rates and shorter stays.

Answer E: The different locations for the various hospitals tells us that they are different in some way, but that difference does nothing to explain the similarity of their rates of infection and length of stays. As with answer B, when the paradox is that two things are similar that should not be, answers that describe differences are typically incorrect, and vice versa.

The exception to that rather broad rule about similarities and difference is when a difference causes a similarity by negating another difference. Imagine a variation on answer A above - what if the staff at Woodville has much better training in infection management than the staffs at the other hospitals, or that the hospital has the latest and greatest infection control procedures in place while the others do not? Woodville's hospital has a disadvantage in that they only have semiprivate rooms, but if we can counter-balance that disadvantage with a corresponding advantage, that might allow for the two different things to still come out the same. A difference like that, which negates another difference, could be an acceptable answer to a Resolve the Paradox question. While the "similarities and differences" guideline is typically a safe bet, don't cling too tightly to any one rule or technique. The makers of the LSAT are brilliant at finding ways to trick us and trap us and distract us by playing against our expectations and our usual way of thinking. Always stay alert and be flexible!

[can'tgetright]

Hi there,

To eliminate E, I was thinking it was similar to the thinking behind AC B.

AC E requires us to assume additional outside info to "help" it out. For example, Woodville being located in its central business district would give them a "leg up" so to speak, if we also assume being in this location gives Woodville better access to technology/medicine/supplies that would enable them to have results that are up to par with nearby hospitals?

Let me know if my reasoning is on the right track.

Thanks in advance.

[Malila Robinson]

Hi can'tgetright,
Your reasoning works! Because we have to guess at what the differences between the locations in Answer E and the year they were built in Answer B we cannot really be sure that they would in fact resolve the paradox in this question. Great job!
-Malila

[juandresmc]

Hi PS!

Can someone please explain why answer choice (A) deepens the paradox?

While I was doing the test, I hold (A) as a contender because I thought the similarity between the hospitals’ staff (mainly their skill) could explain the similar outcomes. However, now that I am reviewing the question I noticed two things: First, does the “many” in answer choice (A) makes it weak? Since many = some it could be the case that there is only one doctor that overlaps between the hospitals and that seems quite difficult (if not impossible) to explain the similar outcomes. Second, for answer choice (A) to be correct would require the assumption that the doctor/doctors that overlap is/are quite skillful, when it could be the case that they are not skillful at all. Am I correct on these things that make answer choice (A) wrong?

Thank you very much.

Best regards,

Andrés

[KelseyWoods]

Hi Andrés!

One thing to make sure of here is that you have a clear idea of the paradox. The paradox isn't just that Woodville has similar infection rates/length of stays as other nearby hospitals, but that it has these similarities despite the fact that it doesn't have any private rooms and the other hospitals do. Usually hospitals without private rooms have higher infection rates and longer stays than hospitals with private rooms. So the paradox is what makes Woodville different than other hospitals without private rooms? What about Woodville helps it make-up for the fact that it doesn't have private rooms? Basically, Woodville is at a disadvantage because it doesn't have private rooms, but it's still managing to keep up with the other hospitals. We need to figure out what's helping Woodville compensate for its disadvantage.

Answer choice (A) does not explain what makes Woodville different than other hospitals without private rooms. Rather, it tells us that Woodville has some of the same doctors as the hospitals with private rooms. If answer choice (A) told us that Woodville had doctors that were super skillful then that might mean that they compensate for the disadvantage of non-private rooms and it would resolve the paradox. Instead, it deepens the paradox because it's telling us that a lot of the doctors are the same, meaning there's likely a similar skillset between the doctors at Woodville and the doctors at the other hospitals. If the doctors are the same, then why would patients at Woodville recover more quickly than we'd expect from a hospital without private rooms?

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey

[LawSchoolDream]

Is there conditional Reasoning here?

I did P-->Low inf and Shorter Stay
Not Low inf or shorter stay --> Not Private room --> Semi Private

[Jeff Wren]

Hi LawSchoolDream,

While the first sentence in the stimulus does have the word "if," this question doesn't really involve conditional reasoning. By using the words "generally have lower rates," the sentence is really stating a correlation between the private rooms and the lower rates of infection rather than a sufficient/necessary relationship.