October 2010 LSAT Section 3 Question 20

When people show signs of having a heart attack an electrocardiograph (EKG) is often used to diagnose their condition...

Raheel on July 3 at 09:00PM

Answer Anticipation Issue

My answer anticipation to this question was wrong. It was going along the lines of maybe the EKG misdiagnosed people who were having similarities to those having a heart attack, but not actually having one. So my question is, how exactly do I fix my answer anticipation so that it mirrors to the correct one?

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Emil-Kunkin on July 15 at 02:52PM

I'm not really sure what you mean by your answer anticipation. I think you're saying that the machine wrongly diagnosed people who were not as positive, which actually is a pretty good anticipation. The author claims that one method is better than another because it has fewer false negatives. However there is another type of error, a false positive. If the machine gave way more false positives than the human did, then this clearly weakens the argument. If this is what you were getting at then this is absolutely the right track, and feeds into the right answer. However I think it might benefit you to take your anticipation up a level or two. It seems like you were looking at one very narrow kind of this error. I think that thinking about it in terms of the category of the error, or why it is an error would benefit you more. An anticipation is usually a rough directional guide rather than a true map. Don't treat your anticipation as gospel, but as a compass pointing you in a general direction.