PT106 · S1 · Q18 Essayist: The way science is conducted

Too Strong: should not change Never Stated In the first sentence, the author is saying she's tolerant of making changes. In the second sentence, she's saying "we just need to be clear-eyed about whether the change is warranted and what its price would be". She seems to be insinuating in the last sentence that she would like to change the character of science, but we shouldn't need to read-in a possible belief, or state an assumption, or state an inference. We're supposed to be able to point to an explicit claim that sounds like the answer we pick. Can we point to any claim that says, "We should not make changes that alter the character of science"? No.

The author never committed to the idea that any increase in regulation will change the character of science. She only said that massive interventions (like creating fraud police) would change the character of science. There could definitely be ways to regulate science more closely that wouldn't qualify as massive interventions. More easily, the author never said what this answer choice says. If we're considering it, then we're judging these answers to much by a standard of, "Would that be something the author would also believe?" We want to judge this by the standard of, "Does this answer look like the Conclusion claim that I'm pointing at?" The author never made this claim, so we couldn't possibly point at it.

Although this does seem like our author's opinion in the first sentence, she doesn't support this idea. Instead, she immediately pivots into a counterbalancing thought that we need to be wary of changes, taking into account their price. Her supporting ideas are all about showing how changes are offset with potential negatives. Those aren't reasons for supporting that "science can be changed". They're reasons for supporting the idea that "science should only be changed carefully / mindfully".

This is said in the final sentence, but we're looking for a match for the second sentence. The claim that imposing restrictions would be costly is never supported. Why would restrictions be costly? - because (common sense tells us, not the author) you need to pay people to write the restrictions, people to enforce them, people to handle appeals, people to levy and process fines, etc. Any time we're doing Main Conclusion and we're about to pick an answer that sounds like the final sentence, we should think, "Am I just walking into a trap? Am I just picking this because it's the last sentence?" Sometimes the correct answer is supposed to match the last claim, because sometimes the last claim is the main conclusion, but they put the conclusion in the final sentence of a Main Conclusion paragraph less than 20% of the time.