#25 - Sarah: Our regulations for staff review are vague and

[Francis O'Rourke]

Hi Peterius,

Your initial take on answer choice (E) is correct: we have no reason to care what employees consider fair.

There are people in businesses other than supervisors and the employees that the supervisors supervise: Owners, human resources, upper management, etc... It's not too much of a stretch to imagine this. If interpreting regulations is a job that only HR does, and your supervisor has no say in it, then who cares if your personal views conflict with the supervisor?

Another point you bring up is the 1 minute time limit. You brought this up in another posting that you made recently, and I'm not sure why you are forcing this constraint on yourself. If you were to divide every question up equally, then you will wind up with roughly one minute and 24 seconds for each question. Forcing yourself to answer every question in under a minute is not something I would recommend. You may finish an easier question in 30, 45, or 60 seconds, but I consistently spend over 2 minutes on a number of questions in each section and I end up with a comfortable amount of time to review my work before the 35 minutes are up.

[peterius]

Sure, sure, 2 minutes.

The word "supervisor" means something like "over" "see", the roots of the word. To claim that, for instance, a member of HR is not supervising the staff that it fires... that that couldn't be considered a "supervisory" role... its really a stretch. The stimulus says "regulations for staff review" therefore they are reviewing staff... "review"... a similar word to "supervise". Shareholders could be considered to supervise the whole company, upper management as well. If you are reviewing someone's performance, you are also supervising them. You could say that you could review someone's work without supervising that work while it was ongoing... but all of this is semantics.

Their answer twists the meaning of the word in a completely non-intuitive way.

I mean there's no other good answer but...

[Adam Tyson]

I think you are reading way too much into this stimulus, peterius, and focusing way too much on the premises rather than on the conclusion. The conclusion, or more correctly the link between the premises and the conclusion, is where we almost always need to look to find the gap that we will then strengthen, weaken, identify assumptions, identify flaws, etc.

The conclusion here is staff who have views that conflict with their supervisors may face dismissal. Strengthen that - give me new info that makes it more likely that a conflict with a supervisor, whatever that is (it's not defined and we need not waste time and energy trying to define it), may lead to a dismissal.

Answer B does this by telling us that supervisors are the only ones who get to decide what a regulation means. The staff member who is not a supervisor cannot overrule one who is a supervisor and interpret a regulation in their own favor. That helps the argument by eliminating a possible flaw; it provides a missing piece of the puzzle that helps link the supervisors mentioned in the conclusion back to the regulations mentioned in the premises.

Does it prove that the conclusion is correct? Not at all, especially because we don't know whether a staff member may also be considered a supervisor. But does it strengthen the argument? Absolutely! Not even a close call here.

If we are going to bring in outside info beyond the answer, we are going to spend a lot of time needlessly spinning our wheels and considering far-fetched hypotheses. That way lies madness! That also leads to "fighting" the answer choices, which is a losing proposition every time. Just accept them as true and determine whether they do what the stem asked you to do.

However, if we were going to bring in outside info, I'll point out that my students are encouraged to submit reviews of my performance, although I don't think anyone would reasonably consider them to be my supervisors. I have worked in law firms and corporations where I was subject to peer review (not my supervisors) and review by HR (my superiors in some cases on the org chart, but not what anyone would call my supervisors as I did not work in the HR dept). In my own real world experience, I would argue that your interpretation is the bigger stretch than the one you believe the stimulus is making. It's not doing that, though. Nowhere in this stimulus does anything tell us who might or might not be considered a supervisor.

Finally, to your last comment: that's the pot of gold at the end of the LSAT rainbow! We aren't tasked with picking "good" answers or "right" answers, whatever those are. We are tasked with picking the best answer of the 5 presented to us. It doesn't matter if it's a real stinker, it only matters that you hate it less than you hate the other 4! Never spend any time trying to find a good answer or arguing with an answer that is clearly better than the others. Just pick whatever is best and get moving to the next question! It's like dating at my age - don't be picky, just go with whatever is available! (Thank goodness I'm done with that, btw.)

Keep after it, peterius, but don't be too fussy or detailed. There's no time for that level of scrutiny and debate when you have 35 minutes to answer 25 questions, am I right?

Good luck!

[ashpine17]

I think I messed up which argument I was supposed to be addressing; I don' tknow why but after reading I thought we were supposed to strengthen the idea that these regulations were bad because they were vague? did i mess up there?

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Are you thinking that the first sentence is the conclusion, Ash? The conclusion is at the end here, that some employees could be dismissed for personal conflicts with supervisors. We want to support that conclusion. The principle that states only supervisors get to determine the meaning of vague rules would strengthen that conclusion by showing that in case of disagreement, supervisors can interpret vague rules to their benefit. We don't necessarily need to strengthen that vague regulations are bad--that's a premise of the argument.

Hope that helps!