PrepTest 152, Section 2, Question 1
Student: My university recently enacted new penalties for(38 more words not shown)
The reasoning in the student's(12 more words not shown)
- Afails to specify(13 more words not shown)
- Boverlooks the possibility(18 more words not shown)
- Cpresumes, without providing(12 more words not shown)
- Doverlooks the possibility(16 more words not shown)
- Efails to consider(17 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
Maybe these penalties are different.
I'll accept that the university's earlier attempts failed. That gives the student a reason to be skeptical, but it doesn't establish that every new attempt is bound to fail too. Imagine the old penalty was a brief warning and the new one is a substantial fine. A student who ignored the warning might take the fine seriously. We don't know that this is the change the university made; it's an example of what the argument hasn't ruled out.
What we’re looking for
For the flaw, I'd look for the unsupported move from past failures to certain failure now. Before treating the earlier attempts as decisive evidence, we need to know whether the new policy differs in a way that could change the result.
Working the answers
- A
The exact penalties could help us assess the prediction, but simply leaving details unstated isn't the core mistake. An argument might give us another adequate reason to expect failure without listing every penalty. Here, the problem is that the student treats earlier failures as settling the new policy's outcome without considering a relevant change. D identifies that missing comparison more precisely.
- B
Students who already avoid drinking in campus housing don't settle what happens to students who do drink there. The policy could reduce that existing drinking even if many other students never needed to change. B doesn't address the claim that the new attempt must fail.
- C
Campus housing doesn't have to be the preferred drinking location for the university to try to reduce drinking there. Students could prefer drinking somewhere else and still sometimes drink on campus. The argument concerns whether the policy will work at that location, not where students most like to drink.
- DCorrect
The new penalties might differ from earlier attempts in a way that makes them effective. Our warning-versus-fine example illustrates the possibility. The earlier failures don't tell us what students will do under a meaningfully different policy. We don't have to prove the new policy will work; leaving that possibility open is enough to challenge the claim that failure is inevitable.
- E
Other benefits wouldn't establish success at reducing drinking in campus housing. A policy might have an unrelated positive effect and still fail at the particular goal the student discusses. The conclusion is about that goal, not whether the policy has any value whatsoever.
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