Turning a weaken question into a strengthen

[menkenj]

I was studying with a friend today who mentioned a technique with weaken questions where you turn them into strengthen questions. The idea is that you take the opposite stance of the author's conclusion and then find the answer which strengthens that position.

I examined this technique with a few examples and it does seem to work. But I am feeling a bit apprehensive to adopt this strategy on the test. Are there any instances of when this strategy would fail? What are the potential pitfalls?

My initial intuition tells me this could be useful if feeling stuck and needing a new perspective but as a go-to strategy it might be inefficient. Thoughts?

[Dave Killoran]

Hi Julie,

Discussions of this strategy come up occasionally, and I can assure you that if we felt it was a generally useful approach, we'd promote it. however, if you look at historical student performance, you discover that Strengthen questions are generally harder for students than Weaken questions. You could even see that as people have a better facility for tearing down things than building them up! But either way, for most people what this technique does is take an easier type of question and turn it into a harder type of question.

Additionally, one of the reasons the Assumption Negation Technique works is that it takers a required part of the argument (an assumption) and takes it away. It will often work on Strengthen questions too (and Justify), but there are gaps there where it doesn't have to work every time. Same thing occurs when you go Weaken to Strengthen--it will work most of the time, but it doesn't have to work always.

Thanks!