Logical Reasoning

PT122 · S4 · Q3 Educator: If there is a crisis

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Educator: If there is a crisis in education today, it is one of maintaining quality.

Statements

If there's something wrong with education, it's about quality of education.

People equate learning with degrees and certificates, but you can obtain these credentials without learning much.

conditional (when)

If you don't learn much of value on en route to your credentials, then the credentials are practically meaningless.

Evaluate

It's hard to know where this is headed. There is a big pivot word "But", and typically on Inference questions pivot words create tension between ideas, and we think about how to reconcile that tension.

Here, the tension is people like to think that learning is all about degrees and certificates, but you can obtain those without learning much, in which case they're not really word anything.

Goal

Since this is an early question, we will probably be able to find the most supportable answer just by avoiding answers with language that is Too Strong / Specific, Out of Scope, or an Unknown Comparison.

3.

If the educator's statements are true, then which one of the following must be true?

  1. Increasingly, institutions are granting meaningless

    Too Strong: increasingly

    The author doesn't say that there's been some change for the worse, when it comes to the meaningfulness of degrees and certificates. She said, if there's a crisis in education, not that there is a crisis in education. She said we can obtain credentials without learning much (thereby making the credentials almost meaningless), but she never said that this is increasingly happening.

    3% picked this

  2. It has become easier for

    Unknown Comparison: easier

    Nothing in this paragraph talks about anything that has changed, so there's no support for "easier".

    6% picked this

  3. Educational institutions should cease to

    Too Strong: cease

    The author has not argued that universities should stop granting all degrees and certificates. If anything, it sounds more like a warning to students that they should make sure they're actually learning something of value, en route to these credentials.

    0% picked this

  4. Correct

    Degrees and certificates do not

    Why this is right

    The phrasing X does not guarantee Y is very weak. You only need one example in which X is true but Y is not. Can we support the idea that sometimes a person would acquire a degree / certificate but not have much worthwhile knowledge? Yes. The author told us that you can obtain degrees and certificates without ever learning much of value. This does Reconcile the Pivot, as we somewhat suspected. It combines the wording of "degrees and certificates" from the 2nd sentence with the ideas in the final two sentences (which use the word "credentials" to refer to degrees and certificates).

    Skill tested: Must be True · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    88% picked this

  5. A person benefits from an

    Too Strong

    Too Strong: only to the extent that Out of Scope: effort The author makes it sound like if you don't learn much of value, then your credential is pretty meaningless. But that's not the same as saying, "the benefit you get from your education is directly proportional to effort". The phrasing of "only to the extent that" is just too harsh and specific.

    2% picked this

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