Q3 - Mariah: Joanna has argued that Adam

[kim]

3. (B)
Question Type: Strengthen the Conclusion
Although Mariah discusses Joanna’s arguments against Adam judging the essay contest, Mariah’s conclusion is actually supported by only one premise _ that Adam has no experience in critiquing essays. To strengthen Mariah’s argument, we want to reinforce the position that Adam’s lack of experience alone makes him a poor candidate to judge the contest. Answer (B) clearly strengthens this connection.

(A) is too narrow in scope. It discusses Mariah’s response to Joanna’s argument rather than discussing Mariah’s actual position.
(C) has problems of degree and contradiction. The argument does not discuss the relative importance of bias and expertise (degree). In addition, since Mariah’s argument depends on lack of expertise being sufficient reason to exclude Adam as a judge, if anything it could be construed that she believes expertise to be more important than objectivity, making the answer choice a contradiction.
(D) restates the logic in (C) and suffers from the same problems of degree and contradiction.
(E) is out of scope. Mariah explains that she believes that Adam has no bias, but her argument does not discuss bias or how it might or might not disqualify a potential judge.


#officialexplanation

[emarxnj]

I'm still confused by this one. How does experience equate to expertise? Seems like that's an assumption the argument doesn't really provide for. I recognize all the other answers are shit, but I don't get why that one is right.

I'm pretty miffed about this, as I was one off from my first -0 on an LR section. Question 3!!

[samuel.sanjeeth]

Hi, I agree with emarxnj in that how can experience be equated to expertise? That was precisely the reason I chose A. Is it not too big a leap in assumption? Could someone please explain?

[kristin.smyth]

I got this question wrong for the same reason. I believe that that B is correct because both "expertise" and "experience" could be generally defined as knowledge.

[ohthatpatrick]

I agree that expertise and experience are not equivalent ideas, because expertise is a stronger idea than mere experience.

Consider these two statements:

if you have no experience, you do not have expertise.

vs.

if you have experience, you have expertise.

I think most people would say that the first statement is generally true in common sense, whereas the second one is not necessarily true.

So if this question was trying to make use of the 2nd statement, that really would be a leap.

But instead the correct answer choice is just making use of the 1st statement.

Mariah's argument is this:
~experience --> should not judge

(B) essentially says this:
~expertise --> should not judge

So if we're comfortable making this translation:
~experience --> ~expertise
then (B) would take Mariah's premise all the way to
--> should not judge.

Remember that this question stem is worded "most helps" to justify, so while (B) certainly does not create an airtight argument, it has more to do with Mariah's sole premise than any other answer does.

Hope this helps.

[pipegroup]

I dismissed B for it's use of the word primary. While Mariah chooses experience over "bias", how are we to assume that those are the only two traits that make good judges? Couldn't it be possible that, I dunno, having readable handwriting is another desirable trait for a judge, but we just didn't discuss it here.

In other words, I felt the stimulus easily supported A, while not providing enough support for B. (This mistake would have been cured, in my mind, if the stimulus said something like "A good judge must have little suspicion that they are biased AND they have experience judging essays."

Sigh...

[kyuya]

Mariah's argument essentially states this:

- Begins with Joanna's argument which states that Adam shouldn't be able to judge because of his classmates being in this contest.
- However, its really important to note that after this, Mariah actually is discounting the criteria that Joanna's using to say that Adam shouldn't be able to judge the essay contest - however, ultimately agrees with Joanna's conclusion that he should not be able to judge the contest.
- Mariah uses different criteria; Adam has no experience in critiquing essay's and THAT is why he shouldn't be able to judge the contest

So, special attention must be paid to the end of this stimulus, because it ultimately tells us what Mariahs criteria (and, therefore, the principle) is going to be. So, we know that experience is going to be something to look out for when searching for the principle.

(A) This answer choice hopes that you confuse Mariah discounting Joanna's criteria with what Mariah ultimately deems to be the important criteria.

We know that Mariah actually ELIMINATES the possibility of there being suspicion, so why would she believe it to be insufficient? That would necessitate it being present, which it is not. That is the whole point of Mariahs argument, before she lays out what she ultimately believes to be the right criteria.

(B) Here, we have the right answer. Refer back to the latter part of the stimulus, and it confirms this .

(C) This answer choice can seem a bit confusing, but if we stay with what we know to be true about Mariah's argument (that expertise is important, and bias was not present), then we have no basis for preferring objective decisions over content expertise. The comparison is simply not made.

(D) Similar to (C), this comparison in the relative importance is never made, so this conclusion cannot be drawn.

(E) Again, the only reason bias is brought up in the stimulus is to show that it is actually NOT present in this case, so how could it be more important than anything?