Q2 - College professor: college students

[Mab6q]

Pretty simple flaw question here. Don't be fooled by the word "weakness" in the question stem. If it were a weaken question, it would ask us to add some extra piece of information to the argument; here we are simply describing the flaw through the answer choices.

Conclusion: college students do not write nearly as well as they used to.

Support: almost all of the papers that my students have done for me this year have been poorly written and ungrammatical.

Flaw: the author assumes that the work of his students is an accurate representation of the work of college students in general. He is over-generalizing from a small sample size.

A. the correct answer. Matches the flaw.

B. we don't need to challenge our premise, as this answer seems to be doing.

C. it dosent need to. Out of scope.

D. this is not a flaw. Argument don't need to always present contrary evidence.
E. this is not an issue here.

[dhlim3]

Even though I got this problem correct, it was a toss between answer choice A and choice E, because both seemed plausible.

I won't go into detail for A since it's obvious, but as for E, maybe I misinterpreted the wordings but I felt that another possible flaw was that the professor was not defining what he meant for "not being able to write nearly as well".

My thought process was "ok just because the students write poorly and made grammatical mistakes may not mean they have necessarily become worse at writing. There could be other factors on which the students may actually have become better at that would offset the negatives". So I thought the terms weren't defined sufficiently. But it looks like I went way overboard with this

[maryadkins]

I mean you're on the track in looking for term shifts but I don't think it's a big stretch to to from "not writing nearly as well" to "writing poorly." Those seem pretty synonymous to me. You're write that the gaping hole in this argument is state in (A)—it's not necessarily a representative sample.

[AlexY297]

Hello, I had trouble thinking between Choice A and Choice C and settled on Choice A based on the fact that it was an over generalization on the professor's part and also that seem like a more serious flaw than the poor teaching ability of the professor. Thank you

[ohthatpatrick]

The correct answer should help us argue the anti-conclusion that "College students DO write nearly as well as they ever have".


AUTHOR: No they don't! Almost all the papers my students have done for me this year have been badly written.

US: College students, in general, do write nearly as well as they ever have. The papers your students have given you are bad because ....

(A) .... you just happened to get a bunch of lunkheads this semester. College students in general aren't like these fools.

(C) ... you're just not a good teacher.

Both of those do feel like decent objections at first. But who said this professor is teaching them writing? The objection in (C) only works if this professor is tasked with teaching them writing.

If this is a biology professor, then saying,
"College students write well! The only reason your current students write poor, ungrammatical stuff is because you're bad at teaching them biology!"
would be nonsense.

Also, (C) doesn't make sense as a plausible alternative explanation of the students' crappy writing because the professor has noticed a change in quality from years past to this year. If he was a bad professor, his students would not have suddenly changed in quality.

Also if (C) did work, if we were allowed to say that, "your students are only bad writers because you're bad at teaching them writing", this would still validate what (A) is saying, because it would suggest that these students are unrepresentative of college students in general since they're being taught by a poor teacher

Hope this helps.