Q4 - Oscar: Clearly, student evaluations

[smiller]

Question Type:
Identify the Disagreement

Stimulus Breakdown:
Oscar's Premise: No one is in a better position to judge a teacher than the teacher's students.
Oscar's Conclusion: Student evaluations are the best way to evaluate teacher performance.

Bettina offers her own conclusion that contradicts Oscar's: she claims that peer evaluations, not student evaluations, might be a better way to gauge teacher performance. Bettina might agree that students are in the best position to judge a teacher's performance—eventually. Her premises focus on when they are able to make that judgement. According to her, that occurs long after they submit their evaluations.

Answer Anticipation:
Since Bettina directly mentions student evaluations, and contradicts Oscar's conclusion about them, that is where we should focus our attention.

Correct answer:
(C)

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Half Scope: We could be picky about this one. Notice that Oscar never actually states that students can adequately judge their teachers. He just questions whether anyone can do it better. Students might, in Oscar's view, merely be the least bad at it. And even if Oscar is saying that students can judge adequately, Bettina might agree. Her argument only focuses on when they are able to judge.

(B) Half Scope: Bettina agrees with this, but we don't know what Oscar thinks.

(C) Correct: This is what we predicted.

(D) Half Scope: We would expect Oscar to disagree with choice (D), but we have no reason to believe that Bettina agrees. She even notes that peer evaluations could merely serve as a "supplement" to student evaluations.

(E) Half Scope: Bettina states this, but Oscar doesn't say anything about when evaluations are conducted.

Takeaway/Pattern:
In an Identify the Disagreement question, it's important to notice when one person directly contradicts another. The point of disagreement often isn't this clear, but when it is, take advantage of the ability to predict a correct answer.

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