December 2009 LSAT Section 3 Question 20

Quality control investigator: Upon testing samples of products from our supplier that were sent by our field inspect...

AndrewArabie on May 17 at 05:10PM

Answer Choice B

I ultimately chose D over B because it was more explicit in the flaw I was looking for. I mulled over B for a while but moved on although I couldn't justify why it was wrong. It wasn't until I read B's explanation that it was clear to me what was wrong with it. How should I be thinking about these arguments and answer choices so as to not get bogged down by answer choices like B? Noticing the argument is assuming a representative sample instead of an equal likelihood of choosing a defective item was such a subtle difference to me. I need help seeing those subtle shifts.

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Emil-Kunkin on May 26 at 07:28PM

Hi, I think I would note two strategies. First, for flaw questions, the right answer must be 1) a flaw and 2) something that the author does. Here, B clearly fails on that second test. The author doesn't wrongly assume that inspectors were equally likely to chose a flawed item as a good item, in fact we are told the proportion was more like 80-20.

More generally, I think you're very good at prephrasing, but might be overly attached to yours. I'm not basic it this off this question in particular, but I get a bit of a sense that you come up with strong prephrases which are right most of the time, and more or less search for that or something close to it in the answer choices.

I would suggest you treat prephrases more as a directional guide than a map to the right answer.

AndrewArabie on May 30 at 04:11PM

Thank you Emil. I'll start implementing that approach