#13 - University administrator: Graduate students

[Administrator]

Question #13: Weaken, CE. The correct answer choice is (C)

This is one of only two Weaken questions in this section, and one of only four on this test. Note how much more common Strengthen questions are than Weaken, with eight total versus just four, and consider how to prioritize your study time accordingly.

This is also arguably the hardest LR question on the entire exam, so if you struggled know that you’re not alone. Difficulty is always subjective, of course, but considering only around 1/3 of people answer this correctly it’s clearly a challenging problem.

The university administrator argues that the sole purpose (emphasis mine, and you’ll see why shortly) of having teaching assistants work at the university is to enable them to fund their education, and if they weren’t pursuing degrees there or could otherwise fund their education they wouldn’t hold their teaching posts at all.

Why does the administrator make those statements? They’re in response to graduate students who claim that teaching assistants should be considered university employees and receive employee benefits. The administrator disagrees with that position, and despite the fact that teaching assistants teach and are paid, feels they don’t deserve the usual benefits granted to employees.

We’re asked to weaken the administrator’s argument, so let’s return to the central point of it: the sole purpose of having teaching assistants work at the university is to enable them to fund their education. Initially I italicized “sole,” and the reason why is that it’s an incredibly limiting word! To weaken the administrator’s position all that is needed is any other reason or purpose for having teaching assistants besides helping them fund their education. Provide that and his claim about the “sole purpose” being educational funding is completely invalidated.

So my prephrase here is simply, “I need an answer choice that suggests another reason for the university to have teaching assistants.” Let’s see which one does it.

Answer choice (A): Whether the administrator knows that there are extra costs involved in granting teaching assistants regular benefits is irrelevant. The issue here is why the university has teaching assistants—the administrator says it’s solely to help them pay for school, and we need an answer that implies it could be something else. Answer (A) doesn’t provide that information.

Answer choice (B): Unfortunately for (B) we’re not told much about those adjunct instructors aside from their compensation, so without knowing their benefits status this answer choice does nothing to impact the argument. That is, if the adjuncts received full benefits it might bolster the graduate students’ claims, but we have no idea here and would be ill-advised to speculate.

Answer choice (C): This is the correct answer choice. Remember what we’re looking for: an alternative reason to educational funding/assistance for having teaching assistants at the university. Answer choice (C) provides us with that alternative, in the form of economic interest! It’s clearly cheaper to use teaching assistants than regular faculty, which is why, in the interest of economy (saving money), the university has proposed to replace faculty with assistants. So it may not be that the only purpose of having them is to help them fund their education; it could well be that another reason for using teaching assistants is to save money.

If you struggled with this question it’s almost certainly because you lost sight of the conclusion itself, which, as outlined above, limits itself tremendously with the use of “sole purpose” and is thus vulnerable on that very point. Always focus extremely closely on the conclusion of an argument, particularly when you’re asked to directly affect that argument in some way.

Answer choice (D): If anything this answer choice probably helps the argument, since it tells us that the money earned by teaching assistants is sufficient to pay for school. Regardless, it definitely doesn’t provide an alternative reason for the university to employ them, so the argument is unharmed by this information.

The popularity of this answer among test takers does make a degree of sense, because it feels closely related to the argument (it talks about a seemingly-relevant issue). However it doesn’t do anything to negatively impact what the administrator claims—“the sole purpose...”—so it can be eliminated.

Answer choice (E): This is, at first glance, another tempting answer choice because it seems to strengthen the graduate students’ position that teaching assistants deserve equal benefits. After all, if they do the same amount of work shouldn’t they be entitled to the same rewards? But this does absolutely nothing to the administrator’s argument—there’s no reason to think he or she is any less correct in claiming that the only purpose in having them is to help them fund their education, meaning this answer choice doesn’t weaken the conclusion and is incorrect.

[bricbas]

If you struggled with this question it’s almost certainly because you lost sight of the conclusion itself, which, as outlined above, limits itself tremendously with the use of “sole purpose” and is thus vulnerable on that very point.

I'm having trouble seeing how this the conclusion over the 1st sentence. Granted its the first sentence and I'm aware the first sentence doesn't NEED to be the conclusion but it just seemed to be the ultimate point the administer was trying to make. How is it inferior to the latter conclusion?

[Nikki Siclunov]

Hi bricbas,

Thanks for your question - it's a good one! Our explanation focuses primarily on the author's rationale for reaching the conclusion, which - you are correct - is the first sentence of the stimulus: grad students don't deserve employee benefits. The correct answer choice (C) weakens the conclusion indirectly, by questioning the rationale (i.e. the main premise) for reaching that conclusion. This is unusual, but it still works! Granted, the vast majority of Weaken questions leave the premises intact and exploit an unwarranted assumption upon which the conclusion depends. Then again, there are always exceptions to this paradigm: this question is a prime example of such an exception.

Thanks for pointing this out!

[mokkyukkyu]

Hi,

So I chose D because I thought "exceed their cost of tuition" go against "to enable them to fund their education"...meaning, there are other reasons they give more/need money, not only for education.
So I thought this denies it is the solo purpose...

When do we know we can just deny premise? I thought we need to accept premise as true.

[Nikki Siclunov]

Hi mokkyukkyu,

As discussed earlier, in the vast majority of Weaken questions, test-makers will assume that the premises are true, and exploit the argument's vulnerabilities by focusing on how the premises support (or don't support) the conclusion. Technically speaking, we can also weaken the conclusion by questioning the veracity of the premises - there is nothing wrong with that, it's just not all that common on the LSAT.

Answer choice (D) has been extensively discussed above, so if any portion of this explanation does not make sense, please elaborate on why - in your opinion - answer choice (D) provides another reason for the university to have teaching assistants.

Thanks!

[NeverMissing]

I struggled for a while with this question, and I ultimately chose D. In reading the explanations above about D, it seems that we are to assume the stipends referred to in D are stipends paid by the university to the teaching assistants as their salary for employment. With this information, I see how the answer choice does not weaken the argument. However, I assumed stipend referred to a monetary stipend outside the purview of the university. Because the answer choice did not indicate that the stipend was specifically from the university, I thought we could reasonably conclude that the students were all receiving stipends from elsewhere--private scholarships, perhaps--and this stipend that exceeds tuition cost weakens the premise that the sole reason students serve as TA's is to fund their education (since the stipend already fulfills that function).

This may be a case of the LSAT wanting me to bring in common knowledge that I can honestly say I did not necessarily have. When I see "stipend" with no qualifiers, I do not automatically assume that only a university would give such a stipend. In fact, since we are talking about grad students being employed, I would assume that the terms used to refer to the money the university gives them for their employment would be a "wage" or a "salary" or a "paycheck," something along those lines. When I saw the phrase "stipend," I was sure that would most reasonably apply to money sources outside of their university wage, sources like private scholarship, familial trust fund, etc. These are the types of income sources I would believe could most reasonably be called a "stipend."

Is this the sort of thing the LSAT assumes one will know and bring with them to the test? Because if so, there was no way I would ever get this question right no matter much I studied. My entire understanding of graduate students and income sources allows for private sources to fund their schooling while being called a "stipend." And if, as my understanding allows, the stipend they receive (via answer choice D) exceeds the cost of the tuition, this weakens the premise that "the sole purpose of having teaching assistants perform services for the university is to enable them to fund their education." Their education, as I see it, would already be funded from an outside source (the "stipend"), and therefore, the university must be employing them for some other function besides helping them fund their education, thus weakening the argument.

When I saw this was a weaken question, my prephrase was the same that has been described above: "There is some other reason besides helping to fund their education that universities employ graduate students as TA's." The way I understand it, this can occur in one of two ways in the answer choices: 1) Present an alternate reason for employing grad students (B does this, I grant), or 2) Show that the need for grad students to fund their education has already been satisfied, which in turn must necessarily imply that they are being employed for some alternate reason. Even if it is never explicitly stated what the alternate reason is, if it can be shown that the grad students in fact DO NOT need any help funding their education, this implies that their employment is occurring for some other reason, and this is enough to weaken the premise that states that funding their education is the "sole reason" for employing the grad students. This line of reasoning, coupled with the belief that the stipend was from private sources, led me to choose answer choice D.

There may be some major flaw in my reasoning above (taking for granted for the sake of my reasoning that the stipend is privately sourced), and if so, could you please help parse the flaw? Honestly, I would be glad if my reasoning is flawed because that is something I can study and work on. The specific terms used to distinguish university funding for graduate students vs private sources--that is something I am just going to have to take a big whiff on should it arise again on the LSAT.

[Emily Haney-Caron]

Hi NeverMissing,

Great question! I'm so impressed with the thought you put into figuring this one out, and I really appreciate you taking the time to fully explain where you reasoning was.

The primary definition of a stipend is a payment to a student (generally, by a university). It seems like this is a case of you not being fully familiar with a particular usage of a (somewhat specialized) vocabulary word, which I agree makes it hard to study for questions like this one. However, the good news is, questions where you have something like this trip you up are going to be a very small minority, and if you are prepared to correctly answer all the questions where you don't get an unfamiliar usage of a word, you'll be in a position to do very well on the test. I think that when you do run up against something where you aren't sure what the word means, the best approach is probably avoid making assumptions. You said in your post that you assumed the stipend referred to a payment not from the university, but there wasn't anything in the question to suggest you should assume that; you could have just as easily assumed it was a payment from the university. In those situations, the best thing to do is to avoid assuming, and instead think to yourself, "This could describe either money from the university or from another source. Since I don't know which, this statement as written does not weaken the argument; if it specified the source was external, then it might, but I just don't have that info here." Then, choose another answer. Does that approach make sense to you?

You should feel great about having a prephrase for this question that was spot-on. This was a tricky one, and you went to the answer choices as prepared as you could be. You also identified that B did weaken the conclusion, you just got stuck between B and D. That's a great starting point! I think if you go into future questions making sure you don't jump to any conclusions about vocabulary words with which you may not be 100% familiar, you'll find that you're able to get through those questions without being phased by it.

[nlittle]

It seems like answer choice D was not discussed as extensively as I would need it to be to fully understand why it was wrong. To me, D weakens the causal relationship by showing the effect when no cause exists... If the students tuition was paid (the cause is eliminated), why did they receive additional money that was not applied toward funding their education? If I were to put forward a guess, its that this could just be a broader definition of cause and effect than I am thinking of where since a general need exists for the money (to fund their educations) the effect would be the program existing in general despite how much they are paid. Is this right?

[James Finch]

Hi Nick,

Answer choice (D) is a very attractive wrong answer, deliberately placed to trip up test takers. The problem with it lies in the stimulus's stated purpose for stipends of teaching assistants: they "fund their education." Tuition is just one aspect of the cost of education--prospective students must factor in living expenses, housing, food, books, etc., when choosing a university to attend. So the fact that TA stipends are larger than the cost of tuition should not be surprising, as students have other costs that may rival or even exceed the cost of tuition, all of which could fall under the umbrella of cost of education.

Hope this helps!

[harvoolio]

I was a perfect 12-0 before this question, but alas I like the others chose (D).

In retrospect, there are two reasons why I think (D) is wrong, one of which James stated above which is that "cost of tuition" is not the same as, but a part of, "fund their education". So, the additional stipend might still be towards funding their education and hence, not weakening the argument.

The other reason brings in outside knowledge of the definition of "stipend" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stipend). Stipends are usually distinct from income or salary denoting a relationship that is not strictly employer-employee like for internships, or specifically to pay graduate students to fund their education in lieu of providing wages or other employee benefits.

I hope this helps.