#23- Politician: The current crisis in mathematics education

[SLF]

With regard to LSAT #54, Section #4, Question #23, how do I process this problem and select the correct answer / eliminate the incorrect answers?

From a conditional perspective, my take on the stimulus was:

Remain Competitive Alleviate Crisis
Alleviate Crisis Employ Successful Teaching Methods
Teaching Subject Succeeds Students Spend Time Outside of Class Studying

But for me, the "gaps" contained within the answer choices relative to these rules didn't make for any attractive answer choices. That is, they all seemed equally "wrong" to me.

[Jacques Lamothe]

Hey SLF,

You definitely diagrammed the stimulus properly! The next step is to diagram the answer choices to see if they can be inferred from the conditionals you got from the stimulus. In this case, answer (B) is the correct choice. It's a bit tricky to diagram because it uses the term "unless," but we have a useful rule for diagramming these types of sentences. Whatever is modified by unless is our necessary condition. Then we negate what comes before unless and that becomes our sufficient condition.So we can write out answer choice (B) as "Overcome crisis --> Students study outside of class." We can infer this by combining the second and third sentences that you diagrammed. If we know "Overcome crisis --> successful teaching methods" and "successful teaching methods --> Students study outside of class," we can combine them to find answer choice B.

I hope that helps!

Jordan

[SLF]

Thanks so much.

[German.Steel]

With all due respect to the LSAT writers, this is a dumb question because of (E). While (B) is obviously correct and definitely what the question writers were going for here, (E) definitely works as well, which caused me to waste a lot of time going through (B) and (E) multiple times.

Ask any mathematician about (E) and they'll tell you that eliminating the possibility of an occurrence that would necessarily result in a zero probability of a third thing happening, necessarily increases the chances of that third thing happening. And any English teacher could tell you that "increasing the chances of something happening" is reducible to "helping that thing to happen."

Not too troubled by this because I haven't seen anything comparable in a recent LSAT, but I do feel like sometimes they were a little more lax on their standards of correctness/incorrectness on older tests.

[Adam Tyson]

I think they got this one right, German.Steel, because students spending time outside of class would not do anything to prove that teaching methods are succeeding, and it is that success that is necessary for alleviating the crisis. It's not the time outside class that matters, but the teaching methods which get students to do that which are necessary.

Answer E is a simple Mistaken Reversal. We cannot say that having the necessary condition would prove that we have the sufficient condition. We MIGHT be able to say that it MIGHT help, but this is a Must Be True question, and the correct answer has to be absolutely foolproof. While E seems like it's reasonable, it's not foolproof, because we still might have unsuccessful teaching methods, which means the crisis in education would still be ongoing, which means we could not remain competitive. Answer E is a definite "maybe," but that's just not good enough when we want something that must be true!

[jhobgood16]

I have a question about (D) on this one. Does it fail because "Only if..." would be a necessary condition clause? Such that:

students spend a significant amount of time outside of class studying mathematics ---> succeed in remaining competitive in the global economy.

You get a mistaken reversal in other words?

[Adam Tyson]

Correct, jhobgood16! We don't want to see "remaining competitive" as a Necessary Condition, but as a Sufficient Condition. Answer D gets that backwards. Good eye!