Q11 - Editor: when asked to name

[Tpilkati711]

How did people go about deriving this answer?

Thanks!

[ohthatpatrick]

This is a Determine the Function question (or "Role of the Claim" as others call it). We have to start by finding the Main Conclusion. It's common on these questions for the Main Conclusion to be hidden at the beginning or in the middle. It's also common to find Subsidiary Conclusions.

Here, the main conclusion seems to be the final sentence:

CONC: there is clearly something deeply wrong with the educational system

why? what premise(s) is offered?

PREM:
The results of a survey seem to indicate either that most high school students don't know when Shakespeare lived or that most high school students don't know what "contemporaneous" means.

Now that we have the argument core straightened out, let's see which claim they're asking about. They're asking about the survey.

The survey is definitely part of our premises.

Unfortunately, labeling that as a "premise" doesn't help at all with these answer choices, because they all agree that this claim was used "as evidence" or "to illustrate" (both of which are synonymous with premise).

So what's really going to differentiate the answers is how they identify the conclusion. They all say that "it's used as a premise to support _______". Well that _____ needs to match the conclusion.

(A) the conclusion was not that "the educational system is producing students ignorant of poetry's history"

(B) the conclusion was not that "some questions are ambiguous"

(C) the conclusion was not that "research results are difficult to interpret"

(D) the conclusion was not that "ambiguous data still allows us to draw conclusions"

(E) the conclusion WAS that "something is deeply wrong with the educational system"

So (E) is correct.

Hope this helps.

[WaltGrace1983]

I thought answer choices (C), (D) and (E) were super tough. I knew that "there is clearly something deeply wrong with the educational system" was the main conclusion. However, I had a hard time deciding if there was an implied intermediate conclusion, something about not knowing exactly what the statistic meant.

(C) could be eliminated also because we weren't talking about research results being difficult to interpret, but rather this specific result is difficult to interpret.

Yet I got hung up on (D).

On a moral general level, does the correct answer to these Role questions have to be pretty explicitly stated or are there implied conclusions that could also be the correct answers?

[snoopy]

I thought answer choices (C), (D) and (E) were super tough. I knew that "there is clearly something deeply wrong with the educational system" was the main conclusion. However, I had a hard time deciding if there was an implied intermediate conclusion, something about not knowing exactly what the statistic meant.

(C) could be eliminated also because we weren't talking about research results being difficult to interpret, but rather this specific result is difficult to interpret.

Yet I got hung up on (D).

On a moral general level, does the correct answer to these Role questions have to be pretty explicitly stated or are there implied conclusions that could also be the correct answers?

The method for Role questions is to understand how the statement in question is used in the argument. You knew what the main conclusion was but couldn't determine if there was an intermediate conclusion. Intermediate conclusions are statements supported by evidence and used to support the main conclusion. There aren't ever "implied" intermediate conclusions. Not sure if you thought the statistic was an intermediate conclusion, but it's not because there's no other premise supporting this statistic, so the statistic is not a conclusion. This statistic (60% of HS students picked a 20th century poet) is used as evidence to support a conclusion (and, in this case, the only conclusion).

[LolaC289]

(C) could be eliminated also because we weren't talking about research results being difficult to interpret, but rather this specific result is difficult to interpret.

Yet I got hung up on (D).

On a moral general level, does the correct answer to these Role questions have to be pretty explicitly stated or are there implied conclusions that could also be the correct answers?

I chose (C) during timed test, during review I found that understanding the correct function of the sentence begins with "Admittedly, ..." is key to get rid of (B) and (C).

At first I didn't know why the author suddenly popped out "admittedly, this result is hard to interpret." Then I found out he was conceding a point to possible objection. So the "hard to interpret" part does not weaken nor directly support his argument, it supports by ruling out a possible critique to his explanation of the result. His argument can be diagramed as follows:

Survey Result:
60% students picked a 20th century poet when asked to name a poet contemporaneous with Shakespeare. (Which is incorrect naming because Shakespeare lives in 16th century and "contemporaneous" means living in the same era)

Author's Explanation:
There is clearly something deeply wrong with the education system

Possible Counter-Point:
But the result is hard to interpret accurately. (Instead of something wrong with the education system,) it could just be that students don't know what "contemporaneous" means or any poets who live in Shakespeare's era.

Author's Response:
This is true, but either way, it still shows the wrongness of the education system.

Thus (C) is wrong because the result is NOT used primarily to illustrate or evidence the CONCEDING point. The conceding point is also based on the result, but the author refuted the conceding point altogether using his conclusion.

Back to Walt's second question. Personally I think support to IMPLICIT conclusion/assumption can be correct answer, theoretically, but I don't remember any question tests on that.

I think it may have something to do with the fact that, when making an argument, we are always making many assumptions at the same time, and since the question is "functions primarily in the argument for", it is hard to claim that supporting some implicit assumption is the primary function of certain premises while the main conclusion, which the argument is set to prove in the first place, is in existence.

However, I think (D) is wrong because there is nothing ambiguous with the data itself. The percentage is 60%, subjects high school students, clear as day. There may be ambiguous interpretation with the data like the author raised, but that is not what (D) is saying. (B) actually plays on the same point. There is no ambiguity of the questions, only of the interpretation. The question sets out pretty straight.

Hope this helps.