Most universities today offer students

Answer choices

1. A

   Out of Scope: interesting3% picked this

   The history courses that university students find most interesting are comprehensive in their coverage of

   We're not discussing how interesting students do or don't find these classes, just how in-depth and cosmopolitan the education. There's no common sense link between "depth / cosmopolitanism" and "student interest". This answer gives us a relationship between those topics, but we have no sense of whether students at most universities are more interested than they used to be.

   3%
2. B

   Too Weak5% picked this

   Many students at universities whose history courses require the reading of books covering all periods and world cultures

   This seems to help somewhat because being forced to do study-abroad definitely sounds like a cosmopolitan education. But "many" is a very unimpressive quantity (it could be as little as 10 or 20 students). Also we don't know if most universities "require reading books covering all periods and world cultures", only that most universities no longer have such a blind spot when it comes to Asian / African / Native American history. So the "study-abroad" value this answer provides is attached to many people at an unknown number of universities.

   5%
3. C

   Correct81% picked this

   The extent to which the textbooks of university history courses are culturally inclusive is a strong indication of the extent to which students at

   Why this is right

   This is an atypical correct answer for Strengthen, because it acts more like a Necessary Assumption, just linking Premise language to Conclusion language. However, you can imagine that if history courses were not a strong indication of how in-depth / worldly the education was, that would be a huge objection. So it definitely strengthens the argument to be told that the author's Evidence is a strong indication of her Conclusion.

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

   81%
4. D

   Weakens1% picked this

   Universities at which the history courses are quite culturally inclusive do not always have courses in other subject areas

   This points out the potentially atypical sample of history courses, as a proxy for "university education". It makes it seem like history courses and overall education are sometimes not fair to compare, when it comes to cultural depth / worldliness.

   1%
5. E

   Too Weak10% picked this

   University students who in their history courses are required only to read textbooks covering the history of a single culture will not get an

   This is a fair assumption the author is making, but validating this assumption doesn't have as much power as validating the assumption in (C). The author was saying that the old history education didn't include important cultures like African, Asian, and Native American. She wasn't saying that any history courses covered the history of a single culture, so even though she would agree with this statement presumably it's not really addressing any issue the author was examining. Since the author's Conclusion is about a change, that most universities' education is now more in-depth and worldly, a stronger answer does more to convince us that something has changed for the better. (C) works because we went from being less inclusive to more inclusive, by adding coverage of A/A/NA cultures. (E) doesn't give us a way to say, "because we're doing more of X, we're getting more of Y".

   10%