Q17 - Educator: Traditional classroom education

[peg_city]

Just making sure I did the conditional reasoning right...

I haven't looked at the answer yet, so I could very easily be wrong

Traditional Classroom --> Education Ineffective --> Social~

insight -> Social

Traditional Classroom -> Rigid + Artificial

I had difficulty finding the conclusion. I think it is the first bit from the first sentence "Traditional classroom education is ineffective"

My guess is the answer is C, mainly because D can be assumed already from the inferences I did. Is this right?

Thanks

[littlebibliophile]

Hi, I interpreted this question a little differently. After reading the stimulus, the last sentence seemed tacked on, and the crux of the argument is:
Traditional classroom education is ineffective because it isn’t a social process, and only social processes can develop insight. I thought of it simply as: : ineffective because ~social process → no insight. This brings up the gap - Why is the classroom education ineffective because it has no insight? We need something to bridge this gap. (D) says that education is not effective unless it develops insight. So, if you prefer diagrams, this says:

~insight --> ~effective

so combining that with the info in the stim we get:

~social process --> ~insight --> ~effective

This bridges that gap and (D) is the correct answer.

[noah]

Hi, I interpreted this question a little differently. After reading the stimulus, the last sentence seemed tacked on, and the crux of the argument is:
Traditional classroom education is ineffective because it isn’t a social process, and only social processes can develop insight. I thought of it simply as: : ineffective because ~social process → no insight. This brings up the gap - Why is the classroom education ineffective because it has no insight? We need something to bridge this gap. (D) says that education is not effective unless it develops insight. So, if you prefer diagrams, this says:

~insight --> ~effective

so combining that with the info in the stim we get:

~social process --> ~insight --> ~effective

This bridges that gap and (D) is the correct answer.

I think littlebibliophile nailed it!

To continue her approach to the wrong answers:

(A) looks good - there's education and insight, but it switches to discussing "genuine" education. Though artificial interactions were mentioned, genuine vs. artificial education was not. Furthermore, this seems to make the education the necessary part of the relationship, while we need the insight to be - like (D) does it!

(B) is tempting since it connects to effective education. However it is telling us how to make education effective, and we want to know whether having artificial interactions, etc. allow us to conclude that something is ineffective. You can try to find a useful contrapositive, but it just isn't there!

(C) doesn't get us to the conclusion - where's the effective education? Furthermore, this answer is strange - we already know from the stimulus that the interactions in a traditional classroom are not truly social - and that's the important information. We also learn that they are rigid and articial, but that is irrelevan to the argument's core (for all we know, all classrooms interactions are like that, and this was just some extraneous information). (C) is tempting if you thought the last sentence was important, and its connection needed to be strengthened.

(E) is out of scope - we're discussing traditional classrooms. Classic trap answer.

If you applied a more formal approach, it might have looked like this:

The conclusion is Traditional --> - Effective

The premises are: Traditional --> - Social
Insight --> Social

So, if we try to link up the premises to form the conclusion (using the conclusion as a "frame"), we get:

Traditional --> - Social --> - Insight --???--> - Effective

And, as you can see I've noted above, we're missing that last link, which is usually the case in this sort of sufficient assumption question. (D) provides us the contrapositive: effective --> insight.

It should become clear to you that this approach is really the same as the less formal approach quoted above. The key is to make your formal conditional logic make sense in a regular everyday logic too.

Great question and explanation above!

[littlebibliophile]

Thanks Noah, and thanks for that great elaboration.

[tuh119]

Is answer choice (C) an assumption to the argument, although it does not lead us to the conclusion?

[noah]

Is answer choice (C) an assumption to the argument, although it does not lead us to the conclusion?

I don't believe so. I see the last sentence as irrelevant to the core - we already know that the interactions are not social, and the last sentence explains how. For it to become important, we'd need to know that social interactions cannot be like that, and then we'd also need to know that this sort of interactions means the education can't be effective. But, that's a lot of work to make that sentence relevant. (C) is part of that effort, but it's not enough.

[hwsitgoing]

Hi,

I initially chose C for this question in an attempt to connect the last sentence to the rest of the stimulus. I am wondering if anyone has any tips as to how they recognized that it was irrelevant to the argument in this case.

I don't want to make the same mistake again but I'm not sure how to avoid it since I've been taught to always try to connect the statements of the stimulus for assumption questions...

Thanks!

[noah]

I've been taught to always try to connect the statements of the stimulus for assumption questions...

I think you should follow the approach in our LR book and connect the conclusion to the premise that supports it. Not every statement is necessarily relevant to an argument. Find the conclusion, ask yourself why (to identify the premise) and then identify a gap. Then compare answer choices to the core you've identified. There's a lot to this, so start practicing on easier questions - don't allow yourself to only get the right answer through informal "getting" the argument - learn to boil it down so that "getting it" becomes getting the core.

In this argument, the last sentence gives us a bunch of information about how a traditional class is not truly a social process - which we already were told is true. It's a "premise booster."

[LSAT-Chang]

Could someone please take a look at my diagram for this one? I originally got this Q wrong since I was under time pressure and didn't have enough time to diagram so just kind of tried to match new concepts and ended up with (B). Now that I've had the time to thoroughly solve this Q, I landed in the correct answer (D)!

Trad class education --> NOT social process --> NO insights
Trad class education --> rigid + artificial
________________________________________________
Trad class education --> NOT effective

(D) connects the "NO insights --> NOT effective" part.

I was wondering if this would be correct as well:

(F) rigid + artificial --> NOT effective

I just thought that last sentence also described traditional class education but wasn't sure how it played out. All I knew was that the first line is our conclusion and the next line supports it. But wasn't sure if that last line could also be said to support the conclusion. Thoughts??

[zainrizvi]

I thought (C) helped connect the link between the intermediate conclusion that education is not a social process. How is this reasoning incorrect?

Is it because I'm interpreting the intermediate conclusion incorrectly? Is it just a premise? But the last sentence really seems to evidence for it

[noah]

It's confusing, but I think we should simply accept that education is not truly a social process as a premise.

The last sentence seems like support for that premise (thus making it into an intermediate conclusion), but who knows if what is said there is describing something that is not truly a social process.

More importantly, even if that premise is an intermediate conclusion, (C) would just link the first premise to the first intermediate conclusion. We still have the gap between the (now) second intermediate conclusion - that traditional classrooms don't develop insights - and the final conclusion. We're looking for a sufficient assumption, meaning it should make the entire argument valid.

Since we know that the correct answer doesn't deal with the alleged gap you identified, we can infer that the LSAT didn't consider that a gap, thus we're supposed to accept that the traditional classroom is not truly a social process.

[nicolauria]

Here's how I broke it down. Hope it helps someone!

Traditional classroom education is ineffective because education in such an environment is not truly a social process

-SP (social process) ---> -E (effective)

and only social processes can develop student insights.

DI (develops insight) ---> SP (social process)

We need something to connect these two statements.

(D) Education is not effective unless it leads to the development of insight.

E (effective) ---> DI (develops insight)

combine this with our second conditional statement DI ---> SP

We get E ---> SP and the contrapositive is -SP ---> -E

[cwolfington]

I chose C at first because I misread the conclusion. The conclusion is "Traditional classroom education is ineffective". C does not trace back to the conclusion, so it is incorrect.

The word "because" in the first sentence is the beginning of the premises, and it's confusing because conclusions are usually an entire sentence. Be on the look out for these subtle tricks, because they exist, and LSAC will add an unnecessary sentence just to throw you off.

[smgeroux]

Just read for the argument core:

Premise: 'education in a traditional environment is not a social process and only social processes lead to insight.'

Conclusion: 'Education in a traditional environment is not effective'

Gap: negate to adjust for "unless" and...
'if education is effective, then it leads to insight'

The last sentence is irrelevant and is there to mess with your head. That's the "trap"

[ganbayou]

Is B wrong because it reverse the logic?
So the conclusion is about ineffective, but B talks about how it can be effective.
P: traditional classroom=>interaction is rigid and artificial
C: Traditional classroom=>ineffective
Choice B: ~interaction (rigid and artificial)=>effective

[CharlesS800]

I got this question wrong when doing it during a timed section. I chose answer A originally.

I identified the argument as:

Education in traditional classroom environment is not a social process + Only social process can develop student insights ---> Traditional classroom education is ineffective.

It seemed to me that the gap in this argument was between [student insights] and [traditional classroom ineffective]. I decided that the correct answer would address this gap and then proceeded to the answers.

Upon first pass, I kept answer A.
I got rid of answer choice B because the gap that I identified was not to determine whether classroom teaching was effective, but the opposite.
I got rid of answer choice C because its use of "rigid and artificial," something that I saw as extraneous to the argument.
D seemed to fit the bill so I kept it around.
E was, similarly to choice C, out of scope of the argument that I was looking to bridge, so I tossed it as well.

I then drew out the conditionals for both A and D. A fleshed out conditional of A seemed to tackle the opposite of what I was looking for, bridging something to the development of insight instead of [traditional classroom ineffective]. When I created the conditional for D, replacing unless with if not, it created a conditional that fit the bill for filling the gap so I selected D upon this review.