A university professor researching

Answer choices

1. A

   Correct79% picked this

   The subjective effects of occasional sleep deprivation are more pronounced than are its effects

   Why this is right

   This speculates a reason for the mismatch between the professor's self-perception of her inferior teaching and her students' oblivion as to any big difference in her performance as a lecturer. Ultimately, this goes with the hypothesis that "she felt like she was bombing, but in reality she was holding it together well". Why are we justified in supporting this hypothesis over the converse, "in reality she was bombing, but the students didn't notice it for some reason"? Well, we have to play the common sense card. If there's 100 students in a lecture hall, and 90+ of them think the lecturer is acting normally, while there's 1 sleep-deprived professor who thinks that she, the lecturer, is acting abnormally, there's a better chance that the 90+ students have the more accurate perception.

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

   79%
2. B

   Too Strong: no one can15% picked this

   No one can assess the overall effects of sleep deprivation on a particular person as well as

   This answer would be dangerous, even if it were more softly worded like, "A sleep-deprived person can better assess the overall effects of sleep deprivation on them than can an audience of people listening to a lecture." After all, in the Battle of Different Perceptions of whether or not the professor was actually bombing during these sleepy lectures, this answer arbitrarily awards the "correct" perception to the professor. The professor was better in assessing the effects of sleep deprivation than her students were. In the correct answer, we validate both perceptions as correct. The inner and the outer are different, (A) says, so it's possible the professor was right that internally things were way off and that the students were right that externally things were pretty normal. That would be enough to get rid of this answer, but the easiest way to get rid of it is the hyperbolic phrasing of "nobody can do X better than Y".

   15%
3. C

   Out of Scope Comparison0% picked this

   Sleep deprivation has less effect on professors' job performance than it does on the job

   This passage only involves data on the effect of sleep deprivation on one professor. We can't really assume we know anything about other professors' experience with sleep deprivation, nor can we leap to a broad comparison with how people of other professions experience sleep deprivation.

   0%
4. D

   Out of Scope Comparison3% picked this

   Occasional sleep deprivation is not as debilitating as extended

   This passage only involves data on occasional sleep deprivation from one professor. We can't really assume we know anything about other people's experiences with occasional sleep deprivation, nor can we leap to a broad comparison between occasional vs. extended sleep deprivation.

   3%
5. E

   Opposite, if anything2% picked this

   University students in a lecture audience tend to be astute observers

   We don't know whether the "correct" perception of the professor's performance was "She's struggling" vs. "She's normal", so we have no way to say whether the lecture audience was generally correct or incorrect in their observation of their professor. In the event that she was really struggling and they were too obtuse to notice, that would suggest the opposite of what this answer is saying.

   2%