#8 - The director of a secondary school where many students

[Administrator]

Complete Question Explanation

Flaw in the Reasoning-CE. The correct answer choice is (C)

This is a Flaw in the Reasoning question, specifically a flaw in the director’s reasoning. The committee finds that the source of academic problems is that students spend too much time with sports than with studying. Because of this the director concludes that prohibiting sports would cause the students to spend more time studying. Almost immediately this reasoning does seem flawed. Why should we believe that just because students cannot play sports they will study instead? And that is where the flaw lies; the director has given us no reason to think this.

Answer Choice (A): This may very well be true but we are not concerned with the students who do not have academic problems. The director’s argument only applies to students with academic problems.

Answer Choice (B): Like (A) we are not looking for why students can play sports and not have academic problems. What applies to this group of students does not necessarily apply to the problem group. Just because a set of students can handle sports and academics does not prove this for all students. And so it cannot be considered a flaw in reasoning.

Answer Choice (C): This is the correct answer choice. We determined that the director’s flaw was that he gave us no reason to think that time saved on sports will be spent on studying. (C) tells us that the director overlooked that “at least some” students will in fact do this.

Answer Choice (D): Once again the students who do well academically are not the focus of the argument. It is fixated on the same idea as (A) and (B).

Answer Choice (E): The director does not care about the school’s sports program. His argument is focused on fixing the academic problems. He makes no claims about whether it will hurt or help the sports program.

[Legallyconfused]

Weird question: When an author "fails to establish" something does it have to be true that he/she fails to establish something that is necessary (a necessary condition) for the argument to work? For example in this question, if we negated (C), as we do to determine if answers are correct in Necessary Assumption questions, it would say, "None of the time the students will save by not participating in sports will be spent on solving their academic problems."

Are these type ("fails to establish") of flaw questions somehow related to necessary assumption questions?

I don't know if this makes any sense.

Thanks though!

[KelseyWoods]

Hi Legallyconfused!

Yes, when you have a Flaw question asking for what the author "fails to establish" you are looking for an answer choice that would be necessary for the argument. There are plenty of things that authors fail to establish in arguments, but failing to establish something that is not necessary for the argument is not a flaw. It's when an author fails to establish something necessary for the argument that he/she runs into trouble. Basically, the author has made an unfounded assumption. The phrase "takes for granted" works in a similar way.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Kelsey

[fortunateking]

I eliminate B and D because they are saying the same thing: students who do well academically → do not spend time on sports. Am I correct?

[fortunateking]

Does the "fails to establish" questions automatically leads to Necessary Assumption? If this question is asking for a sufficient assumption it seems to me that both B and D will work.

[Robert Carroll]

fortunateking,

Answer choices (B) and (D) are similar but not identical. Ultimately, neither is the flaw here - the argument doesn't care what happens with students who are already doing academically well, just what could improve the performance of those who aren't.

This is a Flaw question, not an Assumption question.

Robert Carroll

[Mastering_LSAT]

Hi there,

I just wanted to confirm the reasoning behind the correct answer choice.

The author is arguing that both too much time spent on sports and too little time spent on studying are the two causes for the effect, severe academic problems.

Based on the theory behind causation we know that causes on LSAT, unless specified or implied otherwise, are both necessary and sufficient for the effect, i.e., presence of the cause leads to a certain effect, and absence of the cause leads to the absence of a certain effect (Cause A --> Effect B; NOT Cause A --> NOT Effect B).

Back to the stimulus, if the two causes are denied then we could conclude that the effect will not occur either. But in the stimulus by denying only one cause (NOT too much time spent on sports), the author concludes that the effect will not occur (NOT sever academic problems / or students do well academically). However, what about the second cause (too little time spent on studying)? Is the second cause denied or not? This is the missing link.

The author did not deny the second cause explicitly, but assumed (unjustifiably) that it was denied as well, therefore, the missing link is the author’s unjustified assumption that denial of the first cause (NOT too much time spent on sports) leads to the denial of the second cause (NOT too little time studying / or more time studying).

Is my reasoning correct?

Many thanks for all the help!

[Adam Tyson]

Correct, Mastering! You've earned your User Name with that one! Well done.

[Mastering_LSAT]

Thanks, Adam!