Critical Reasoning

College professor: College students do not write nearly as well as they used to. Almost all of the papers that my students have done for me this year have been poorly written and ungrammatical.
Which one of the following is the most serious weakness in the argument made by the professor?
(A) It requires confirmation that the change in the professor's students is representative of a change among college students in general.
(B) It offers no proof to the effect that the professor is an accurate judge of writing ability.
(C) It does not take into account the possibility that the professor is a poor teacher.
(D) It fails to present contrary evidence.
(E) It fails to define its terms sufficiently.

OA after discussion

1. The Professors students this year do not write well
2. All students dont write as well as they used to

A. Correct. The assumption the professor makes in his argument is that his class is representative of all college students. We do not know if that is true without evaluating other students. It might just be that he has a class of poor students.

B. Incorrect. The professor is making a comparison between students this year and last year. Even if he is a poor judge he was still a poor judge in the past making the comparison relevant.

C. Incorrect. The professors teaching has nothing to do with the writing ability of his students.

D. Incorrect. Irrelevant

E. Incorrect. The passage is very clear.

cyrwr1 wrote:College professor: College students do not write nearly as well as they used to. Almost all of the papers that my students have done for me this year have been poorly written and ungrammatical.
Which one of the following is the most serious weakness in the argument made by the professor?
(A) It requires confirmation that the change in the professor's students is representative of a change among college students in general.
(B) It offers no proof to the effect that the professor is an accurate judge of writing ability.
(C) It does not take into account the possibility that the professor is a poor teacher.
(D) It fails to present contrary evidence.
(E) It fails to define its terms sufficiently.

OA after discussion

i agree with "fitz" as this is a classic case of "hasty generalization"...the professor assumes that his class is representative of the entire core group....to weaken it we simply have to prove this assumption wrong

I agree with you guys , the sample of people representing may not be actual representation . IMO A.

Same here IMO A

cyrwr1 wrote:College professor: College students do not write nearly as well as they used to. Almost all of the papers that my students have done for me this year have been poorly written and ungrammatical.
Which one of the following is the most serious weakness in the argument made by the professor?
(A) It requires confirmation that the change in the professor's students is representative of a change among college students in general.
(B) It offers no proof to the effect that the professor is an accurate judge of writing ability.
(C) It does not take into account the possibility that the professor is a poor teacher.
(D) It fails to present contrary evidence.
(E) It fails to define its terms sufficiently.

OA after discussion

Can You cite the source pls

Thanks Fitzgerald23 and others for chiming in.

This was a careless response on my part. I chose B. I should have reread choice 1 as this is a classic example of using subset to represent a group.

OA is A and this is from the Aristotle CR 100.

Thanks,

Cyrus