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Professor O'Brien: Any of my students who heard Mercado's lecture from the beginning would have thought it was fascinating, and I know that some of my students did think it was fascinating, so some of my students must have heard it from the beginning.
Objective: Flaw / Descriptive Weakening Questions
This stem puts the “Descriptive Weakening” in the Flaw / Descriptive Weakening question type. It asserts that the Professor’s argument is invalid, then asks us to break the argument by bringing up a specific scenario: “but what if…?”
In Flaw / Descriptive Weakening questions, we approach the stimulus with a critical eye, looking for unreasonable assumptions and faulty reasoning methods. With practice, it’s often within reach to proactively identify the argument’s flaw well enough to move into the answer choices looking for that specific flaw.
This process is aided significantly by the fact that the LSAT writers routinely pull from a list of common flaws – learning to recognize these flaws when they appear in stimuli and answer choices will save you an enormous amount of time and mental energy.
Argument Summary
Questions you absolutely need to diagram are rare, but sometimes a stimulus really begs for it. This stimulus begs to be diagrammed: “All thisses are thats, some doops are dips, therefore some doopity do.”
The baseline diagram you should arrive at looks like this:
Domain: O’Brien’s Students
Premise 1: Beginning → Fascinated
Premise 2: Some Fascinated
________
Conclusion: Some Beginning
The basic shape of this flawed reasoning is sufficient / necessary confusion: everyone who listened from the Beginning was Fascinated, but that doesn’t mean everyone who was Fascinated was listening from the Beginning. It’s possible that some of these Fascinated kids were from the not-Beginning group. In that world, the author’s reasoning that those kids must have been there from the beginning wouldn’t hold up.
Spoiler Alert: identifying the gap in this argument turns out to be a lot easier than understanding exactly how the correct answer exploits that gap (just look at how long the explanation for (D) is).
21.
The conclusion of Professor O'Brien's ████████ ████ ███ ██████ █████████ ████ ███ ████████ ███████ ██ ███ ███████████ ████
a
some of Professor █████████ ████████ ███ ████ ██████████ ██ █████████ ████ ███ ████ ██████ ██ ██████ ███ ███████
b
many people who ███ ███ █████████ █████████ ████████ ███ ███ █████ ████ ███ ███████ ███ ████████████ ████ ██████ ████ █████ ██ ████ ███ █████████
c
some of Professor █████████ ████████ ████ █ ███ ███████ ████ ███ ███ ███████ ███ ███ ███ ████ ███ ███████ ███████████
d
no one who █████ ███ ███████ ████ ███ █████████ ███ ███████ ████ ██ ███ ███████████ ███ ███ ██ █████████ █████████ ████████
e
not everyone who ███████ ██ ███ ███████ ██ ████ ███ ████ ██ ████ ███ ██████ ███████ ███████ ██ ███████████ ██████ ██ █████ ███ ████ ████ ██ ████████