#13 - University administrator: Graduate students

[Adam Tyson]

I'd be cautious about bringing in too much outside info, harvoolio. I don't think it matters here what the technical definition is of a stipend, only that giving students more money than they need for their tuition does nothing to weaken the claim that they only have the jobs to help them pay for their educations. That money could be in the form of stipends, grants, gifts, kickbacks, bribes from students, discounts, even low-interest mortgages or rent subsidies! If the money was MORE than the cost of their education, that would weaken the argument, because our goal would be more than just helping them to afford that education.

[nmgee]

Even with the above explanations, I fail to see how the third sentence is the conclusion.

Even using the conclusion method from the LR Bible, I do not see how the first sentence can possibly support the third. It seems to me that the second, third, and final sentences, are all premises towards the conclusion residing in the first sentence.

The notion that "Premise: grad students incorrectly claim..." can support "Conclusion: The sole purpose of having TAs is...to fund their education."

I'd greatly appreciate more help with this difficult question. Thanks!

[Adam Tyson]

You're correct, nmgee, and earlier in this thread Nikki agreed with you that the conclusion is indeed the first sentence! This argument presents an unusual case of the correct weaken answer attacking the premises, rather than going after the link between the premises and the conclusion. That doesn't happen all that often on the LSAT, but it certainly can, and in this case that attack on the premise, if true, does weaken the argument.

Given the confusion on this one, I think we will shortly be re-writing our original explanation just a bit to correct that misstatement. Thanks for another reminder that we need to get that done!

[airplane15]

You're correct, nmgee, and earlier in this thread Nikki agreed with you that the conclusion is indeed the first sentence! This argument presents an unusual case of the correct weaken answer attacking the premises, rather than going after the link between the premises and the conclusion. That doesn't happen all that often on the LSAT, but it certainly can, and in this case that attack on the premise, if true, does weaken the argument.

Given the confusion on this one, I think we will shortly be re-writing our original explanation just a bit to correct that misstatement. Thanks for another reminder that we need to get that done!

In this case, isn't the reason why we can attack this premise because it is a intermediate conclusion? The intermediate conclusion is that the sole purpose of having teaching assistants work at the university is to enable them to fund their education. This is supported by the last sentence of the argument. However, as C illustrates, this link between the premise and the intermediate conclusion can be questioned. Thus, we are technically undermining a premises since the intermediate conclusion is used as a premise to prove the main conclusion, but the undermining of the premise is not coming out of the blue.

In a different senario, would it be a valid answer to just deny a stand alone premise?

For example, let's say we have the following argument.

All cats are red. Garfield is a cat. Therefore, Garfield is red.

Would a valid weaken answer in the LSAT world be, "Not all cats are red."?

[James Finch]

Hi Airplane,

I don't see the presence of an intermediate conclusion as important, as there are other LSAT examples of correct weaken answers that undermine premises. The issue with your example is that it is simply stating that a premise is incorrect, of which I can't think of a single example. When the LSAT makers write a weaken question in which the correct answer choice attacks a the validity of a premise, it will be based on an inference based on that answer choice, rather than a clear-cut denial of said premise. Here, while it's an easy inference to make, it's still not a direct denial that helping students fund their education is the "sole purpose" of having TA's--you still have to connect the dots that if they're replacing faculty with TA's for economic reasons, then helping TA's out isn't likely to be the only reason that the university has them.

Hope this helps!

[az305203]

I have the same question that someone had earlier about whether the third sentence is a subsidiary conclusion. The response was that it didn't matter whether it was a subsidiary conclusion or not but I think that there was confusion about the question because I don't think OP's reasoning behind the question had been stated - for me, the issue of conclusion identification in this question lies with how that identification dictates my prephrase. My thought process went as follows:

As Nikki and Adam explained in the comments, I did correctly identify the 1st sentence to be the conclusion of the argument

Argument breakdown:
Conclusion: Graduate students are incorrect in claiming that TAs should be considered employees. Why?
Premises: because the sole purpose...and if they were not...
(Counter-premise: Granted...teach and receive financial compensation)

Stem: Weaken

Prephrase: When I get a weaken stem, I take the course suggestion and I focus on the conclusion, so for my prephrase I go - "Okay, I need a reason why grad students are not incorrect in claiming TAs should be employees"
Simplify the double-neg: "I need a reason why TAs should be considered employees"

Analyze the Answers:
(C) ...10% of faculty replaced... - "okay that seems a bit exploitative but doesn't seem to really give an explanation why TAs should be considered employees, maybe keep it as a Contender"
(E) TAs work as much and as hard... - "okay I don't love it but it definitely seems to go along with my prephrase better than C"

So, to the original point about whether the third sentence ("the sole purpose...") is a subsidiary conclusion - I completely understand the explanation of how C attacks the premise but while taking the test timed I chose E because the prephrasing process from class led me to evaluate that answer choice as a better match than the alternative. However, if I'm improperly breaking down the argument and the third sentence was actually a subsidiary conclusion that I should have characterized in that prephrase then that is something that I could study and correct for next time? The concept of "oh, I did it wrong because I needed to focus on the premise not the conclusion" just feels so antithetical to the whole Weaken prephrasing process that I'm just struggling to figure out a way to prevent this going forward...

Any recommendations about how to correct my analyses would be greatly appreciated, thank you!!

[James Finch]

Hi AZ,

This is an odd Weaken question because the correct answer choice here undercuts not the main conclusion, but rather the premises for that conclusion. Usually a correct Weaken answer will serve as a counter-premise that renders an existing premise irrelevant to the conclusion, not less likely to be true itself. Still, undercutting a key premise, or in this case, two, does also serve to weaken the conclusion.

Your process looks very good, up until deciding between the attractive answer choices. (C) directly attacks both the claim that the sole purpose of having TAs is to allow them to fund their education and the conditional premise that the only two necessary conditions for employing TAs is that they be pursuing degrees at the university and be unable to fund their studies by other means, as it implies there is potentially a third condition of being at least as cheap, and maybe cheaper, to employ than faculty.

(E) is a classic appeal to emotion, but doesn't actually relate to the argument in the stimulus. TAs may work at least as hard as faculty, but so might students, and nobody is considering classifying them as employees. A big red flag in this answer choice is that the wording presumes that TAs are employees already: "...as hard as do other university employees." This means that (E) is requiring another presumption, one that would by itself invalidate the conclusion, so it's effectively circular reasoning in the context of this question.

Hope this clears things up!

[Leela]

Just to clarify, is it a good rule of thumb in answering weaken questions to work on attacking the conclusion before moving to attacking premises? I got caught up in the argument structure as a whole and didn't hone in on the "sole" part of "sole purpose" in the conclusion. Thus, it took me a while to figure this question out.

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Leela,

You are correct. Most of the time when we see weaken questions, we are looking for an answer choice that attacks the link between the premises and the conclusion. It's usually the first place I go with a prephrase. You are looking for an answer that makes the conclusion less likely. The easiest way to do that is by attacking the link between the premises and the conclusion, but you can just attack a premise to weaken an argument as well.

Hope that helps
Rachael

[lolaSur]

Hi!

I just would like to confirm that I am thinking about this correctly.

The stimulus says that the school's sole purpose for hiring teaching assistants is to help them pay for tuition. I understand that C is right because it provides an alternative reason for why the school hires TAs. The alternative reason is that hiring TAs as described by answer C serves the school's economic interest.

Thank you so much!

For my reference: (PT 75, June 2015, LR2, Q13)