LSAT 8 | Section 1 | Logical Reasoning: Q25

LR Question 25 Explanation

QUESTION TEXT: The great medieval universities had no administrators…

QUESTION TYPE: Flawed Parallel Reasoning

CONCLUSION: We should abolish the positions and salaries of the university administrators. This will let us survive longer as a university.

REASONING: Great medieval universities survived for centuries without administrators, yet now that we have administrator we are struggling to survive.

ANALYSIS: A parallel argument would be: medieval universities did not use computers and they survived just fine. We have an expensive computer budget. We should get rid of computer so that we’ll survive.

The stimulus does not show that universities survived because they did not have administrators. It’s just that the two things (survival and no administrators) happened at the same time. Correlation does not equal causation.

We have nothing to prove that modern universities will survive longer if they copy medieval universities and get rid of administrators.

This was a hard question and you might not have gotten the fact that it was a causation-correlation error. There is another way. We’re looking for:

1. A bad argument.
2. That makes an inappropriate comparison.

Answers A, C and E are good arguments. And answer choice D doesn’t make a comparison. We’re left with B by process of elimination. B is a bad argument that makes a comparison.

___________

1. This is a good argument. It’s possible to build an airplane today that flies without a jet engine. It’s a mechanical problem, not a social problem. It might not be possible to run a university today without administrators.
2. CORRECT. Did the use of a computer cause the novelist to get published? Or did they just decide to get serious about work at the same time. We have nothing to indicate the computers cause publishing success. This repeats the correlation-causation error of the stimulus.
3. This is a good argument. The old methods don’t work.
4. This is a bad argument. Tires might be more important than helmets, for example. But it doesn’t make the same error of a correlation-causation to the past.
5. This is a good argument. Ancient waterways are the most likely places to find sites of ancient cities.

Recap: The question begins with “The great medieval universities had no administrators”. It is a Flawed Parallel Reasoning question. Learn how to master LSAT Flawed Parallel questions on the LSAT Logical Reasoning question types page.