College professor: College students do not write nearly as well as they used to. Almost all of the papers that my stu...
jamieloosJuly 27, 2018
Question #26
I answered correctly for this question, but I was also considering answer choice C. Can someone explain why C is incorrect so I can be sure that I am thinking correctly about the question/answer choices?
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@jamieloos, (C) is a bit of a misdirect. It's wrong because it's irrelevant. The statement that the professor is making is that "students do not write nearly as well as they used to," (which seems fairly judgmental coming from a guy who finished a sentence with a preposition, but I digress). He is not assigning blame as to why they're bad writers. He's not saying they're dumber than they used to be or anything like that. So it's possible that the reason they're poor writers is because they've had bad teachers, which could include him.
(A) is correct because the professor is assuming that the poor writers in his class are representative of all college students, which is a major logical leap. Therefore, weakening that logical leap allows you to weaken the argument.
