College professor: College students do not write nearly as well as they used to. Almost all of the papers that my stu...

Rosibeth23 September 12, 2020

Part to Whole?

Hi, I got this answer right because my first thought was the "part to whole fallacy." Was this a good call or lucky guess? I want to make sure I fully understand the 33 common fallacies!

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shunhe September 14, 2020

Hi @Rosibeth23,

Thanks for the question! Unfortunately and fortunately at the same time, this was a lucky guess. The issue here is not a part to whole problem. A part to whole problem is when you say something that’s true of the part is also true of the whole. For example, hot dogs and ice cream taste good individually. So this hot dog ice cream combo I made must taste great. That doesn’t happen here, because the papers are not “part” of the students. And even if you wanted to argue that they were, the professor is not saying that the students are “poorly written and ungrammatical,” but rather that they write poorly.

The issue here is rather an issue with sampling, something you might have bumped into if you’ve taken any statistics classes. We don’t know if this group of students is representative. Maybe this one group is just really bad, and we can’t generalize to all college students based on them.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.