#8 - Some students attending a small university with a well-known choir

[mtlwtiener@gmail.com]

so for this one it seemed like it should be pretty easy and i drew out the conditionals but still ended up with E. can someone anyone explain how is that not the answer and a strategy for this stimulus type please?

[Adam Tyson]

There's a mix of conditional reasoning and formal logic here, mtlwtiener. Here's a diagram of what's going on:

Students Off Campus

Music Major Choir

Conclusion: Music Major Off Campus

We need an answer that will absolutely prove that conclusion. Even though some students live off campus, the music majors cannot. What do we need to say to prove that conclusion is true? We need to show that everyone living off campus is not a music major. It's the conditional reasoning we need to focus on because the formal logic use of "some" won't be strong enough to prove the much stronger conclusion about "none."

Maybe if we knew something about the members of the choir, to tie all the parts together? What if we were to say that choir members don't live off campus? Then we would know the following:

Music Major Choir Off Campus

Boom, conclusion proven through a conditional chain! That's what answer A does for us.

So what impact, if any, does answer E have? We already know that every music major is in the choir, so what if we also knew that everyone in the choir was a music major? Combining those two ideas would give us this:

Music Major Choir

Does this tell us anything about where any of those people live? Nope, it would leave us still wondering how on earth the author got the idea that the music majors are not living off campus. For all we know, with this info in hand, every music major and every choir member (who are the same exact group of people) all live off campus. The answer fails to connect the ideas that need to be connected! That's why E cannot justify the conclusion.