Q23

[bethany.pickett]

..

[ohthatpatrick]

I try to answer these problems in my own words first, because it's important that we have a strong conceptual sense of what happened in each paragraph before we're confused/misled/tangled up in the wording LSAT uses.

P1 identifies a missed opportunity for educational reform but says that there were 2 attempts to do so.

P2 elaborates what the 2 attempts were all about (admitting they did still have shortcomings).

P3 explains that the failure of the 2 attempts was understandable and in actuality the 2 attempts did still help the ultimate educational reform that happened a century later.

On a first pass, I'm gonna defer as soon as I see an ingredient that seems very fishy to me.

(A) 1st ingredient seems fishy. The passage didn't start out describing education in France. Putting a squiggly line ("doubtful") next to (A) and moving on.

(B) 1st ingredient is a little too broad .. "gender equality"? we're only talking about that in the context of educational reform. Squiqqly line, moving on.

(C) 1st ingredient is fishy. The "traditional nature" is described? That's not the same thing as saying "following the French revolution, women were still schooled in the traditional way", which is what the 1st paragraph is really saying. Squiggly line, moving on.

(D) 1st ingredient is broader than the specific topic of the 1st paragraph, but I can make it work. 2nd ingredient is fine. 3rd ingredient seems terribly off. I want something like "eventual reform is achieved, with partial help from initial proposals".

(E) 1st ingredient is not my favorite, but I can make it work for the 1st P. 2nd ingredient is fine. 3rd ingredient seems good. Picking it.

Now that you've heard my realtime thinking, let me address your specific points/questions.

Both (C) and (E) are the only ones that address the final reform. And in terms of strategy (or even "trick") on these types of questions, looking at the last ingredient is usually my shortcut.

Frequently, several of the answer choices start off the same way or in some totally acceptable way. This set of choices was rare, for me, in that I was not cool with several of the 1st ingredients.

Most of the time with this type of question, you see the first couple ingredients go rather safely and the answers really diverge during the last ingredient. So I often ask myself, "what did the last paragraph do?" and then check the last ingredient of each answer choice before deciding whether it's worth reading anything else.

For me, (E) is actually the only one with a legitimate final ingredient.

Here, our last paragraph was saying "neither proposal made it since the climate was so anti-equal education, but, nevertheless, the reform that was finally made a century later made use of these earlier proposals."

I think you got confused with what (E) was saying. Your comments made it seem like you interpreted (E) as "the author discussed the relationship between the two proposals", as though the author compared/contrasted the proposals.

That's not what (E) says. It's saying the author discussed "how the earlier proposals related to the eventual reform". That definitely happens in P3.
Line 47-48, "the vision of reform was not entirely lost"
Line 49-50, "legislators recalled the earlier proposals"
Line 57-58, "various institutions also made claim to revolutionary origin"

(C)'s final ingredient says that the eventual reform "required less of a break with tradition". Where do I get that in the last paragraph? Isn't the reform a huge break from tradition? They founded secondary schools, abolished fees, and established compulsory attendance. Those sound like sweeping additions and subtractions, not just subtle modifications.

I think you probably got swayed by line 56, which references a "long tradition". But the whole point of this sentence is the "long tradition" they're referring to is the two proposals outlined in the 2nd paragraph. It probably doesn't seem like 100 years is much of a long tradition, but again in line 57-60, they refer to the "revolutionary origin" as "conferring tradition and historical continuity", and the revolution was only 100 years prior.

The fact that you seemed to like (C) because you were scanning for 'reform' might actually be symptomatic of why you miss some of these questions. In crafting trap answers, LSAT will frequently bait us with a keyword they know we're looking for, but make the answer broken based on how they use or modify that keyword.

So make sure you reading the entire ingredient for its meaning, rather than being too concerned with one key term.

We often have to be a little flexible and "massage" the wording of the correct answer to fit the way WE would have written an answer to the question.

Based on how you were interpreting (C) vs. (E), it seems like you might not really have grasped how P3 related to P2. So, in this case, it might have had more to do with understanding the passage than dealing with the answer choices.

In general, though, on a 1st pass, get rid of any answer choices that seem to have flagrantly inaccurate ingredients. On the 2nd pass, compare the remaining choices, ingredient for ingredient, and find justification in the passage for why you're picking one over the other.

Hope this helps.