Typically, I go over and explain my thoughts more thoroughly in the actual session — the notes below are kept for student records, but may help you ‘sample’ my teaching approach before our consultation.
PT146 · S3
Score: 19/26 (73%)
q1 ✓good instinct on the prephrase! the survey size is clearly biased: you would only respond to the letter if you already had strong feelings. with the early questions, your prephrase can be a lot stickier — once you found a, which matched it, you can keep pushing.
q2 ✓this is creating a chain of causation: we want to strengthen it. your instincts are good here: D strengthens it by showing that the absence of one part of the chain creates the opposite conclusion, thus making it a stronger link.
q3 ✓again, good job with the prephrase. the important thing to note is that we can expect this conclusion to be comparative, not definite, since we're comparing two groups — we can add that into future prephrases.
q4 ✗i'm glad that you highlighted the direct claim being analyzed: it's a habit you should keep building. however, d doesn't work — that's not the conclusion we're finding. the yellow highlight shows an exception to the rule, not a negation of the rule.
q5 ✓we should spend more time on the stimulus here, rather than going through the answers one by one. attack it directly: why does this not add up (pun intended)? you found the correct answer, but we could prephrase it to find the answer with more confidence.
q6 ✓good instincts here! i think we might want to work on your highlight discipline: making sure that we consistently highlight the conclusion in one color and the support in another color helps your brain pattern-match more easily.
q7 ✓good job here! the evidence for e is slightly weak (we don't know about other differences), but it's stronger than the evidence for the rest.
q8 ✓we're establishing causation here. the key question will be one that could falsify it: you found this in a. good job here!
q9 ✓explaining the discrepancy: the right instinct is to be surprised by the new fact (highlighting the discrepancy is a good move here). genuine curiosity is your best friend here — you used this properly. good job! you can rule out the wrong answers by asking: does this satisfy my curiosity, or just open up new questions?
q10 ✓this is a fun one, and structurally pretty simple. if x happens, then y. therefore, x will cause z. we need to prove that y causes z: d does this properly.
q11 ✓this is a pretty rare type of question: we're asking which of these have to be false? d can actually be proven true using the stimulus: per capita means more people = more pollution. your instincts with e are correct: it's the exact opposite, which is what we're looking for.
q12 ✓highlighting the conclusion can help us break down this argument. what we're basically saying is that using a lawyer lets you tailor the will to your circumstances, so you should use a lawyer. b is correct here — good instincts! in order for the tailoring to be a reason to choose the lawyer over diy, it can't be a property of diy: which isn't established. your instincts with the negation are exactly correct — great job here.
q13 ✗this is a place to drill: the underlying formal structure is incredibly simple once it clicks. x→y→z, therefore x→z. you'll see this a lot in all kinds of argumentation. the tricky thing is establishing the logical chain, which is sort of given backwards: we're told y is true whenever x is true, and z is true whenever y is true. we should be able to mentally restructure this into more convenient phrasing — and that's a good habit to have with any argument. getting lost in the structure is what lost you this point.
q14 ✓good instinct highlighting the claim mentioned, as well as the conclusion that it's interacting with. good job here: you broke it down correctly.
q15 ✓we can summarize the frame as such: being a good manager has two requirements. one of those requirements guarantees the other. this question relies on you getting stuck in the requirements: the more important thing is that you can have the requirements without qualifying. you can be tall enough to ride a rollercoaster, but still have a heart condition that prevents you. great find here — let's break this down more so we can get more confidence.
q16 ✓great instincts here! another place where it's worth being surprised and curious.
q17 ✓great instincts: you used your highlighting properly here (finding the overall conclusion helped you eliminate any answers that hinged on that). subsidiary conclusion: something with support that is itself used to support the main conclusion.
q18 ✗this is a tricky one! yellow feels like the conclusion, but it's actually support: we're explaining why we think that they're overused. "the overall conclusion might be different than the conclusion" — i'm wondering if you could explain this further, because it seems like a mistake but it could be a misphrasing. the overall conclusion is not a vibe that you get, it's a specific argument being supported. d is closer than e, but c is correct because it is being supported by d. an argument might be thought of as "what do we think, and why do we think it?" c is what we think, d is why.
q19 ✗another place where mixing up your highlights might've misled you. d doesn't work, because nowhere do we say that it's the most important goal: just one goal — that's a misreading of the conclusion.
q20 ✓ha, this is a funny one. it's a sufficient assumption, but we feel an instinct to treat it as a necessary one. good find with c: even though it doesn't interface with yeung, like we expected, it would still guarantee the conclusion. i'm noticing you getting quieter around here: i'm assuming that means a lack of stamina. let's talk about whether taking a break in the middle of drilling might help, or whether we should push through — either way, considering ways to keep you talking would be helpful.
q21 ✓this is a causation argument, and you should break this down as such. a helps eliminate a potential confounding factor, which strengthens the link. your lack of confidence after finding this tells me that this is something we should pay attention to: let's talk about whether deciding on the right framework was the problem, or whether it was how the answer interacted with it. basically: is the problem that we didn't know it was causation, or that we didn't know eliminating a confounder would strengthen it?
q22 ✓we're looking for an answer that must be false (could not be true). given the information, we know that e can't be true: tannett is a traditionalist, and all traditionalists are less qualified than all modernists. good find here.
q23 ✗again: we're looking for something that could falsify the conclusion. d doesn't matter: the tendency gives us no information about the specific event, which is the scope of the conclusion.
q24 ✗again, your brain should be reaching for the skeleton here: world lit has two requirements. one of those requirements has its own requirement: it needs one of three things to be true. isolating that structure helps us a lot here: it tells us that we only have absolute positive statements, not relative or normative ones. with d: how can we prove that? it's not listed as one of the requirements at any part of the chain.
q25 ✗what's the flaw here? if you can't identify that it's about the relative sizes of the two groups, then you won't find it in the answers.
q26 ✓this is a fun one: to negate this, we need to provide an example of how the conclusion could be false, and the studio could fail to recover their costs. good find here.