#4 - One of the requirements for admission to the Lunnville

[Adam Tyson]

Happily, yournoona! There are a few indicators that can help, and the first is the presence or absence of the phrase "if true" or some variant (if accepted, if valid, if accurate, etc.) A Justify question must include such a phrase, because you are not looking for something that absolutely must be true, but rather something that IF it was true would prove the conclusion. That's why Justify questions are also known as "Sufficient Assumption" questions - they are sufficient to prove the conclusion.

An Assumption question stem will NEVER use such a phrase! There is no "if" about assumptions - they must be true in the author's mind if their argument is to make sense. That's why Assumptions are also known as "Necessary Assumptions" - they are required, but they don't have to be sufficient.

Another way to tell is through the presence or absence of words indicating that the conclusion is proven - "properly drawn," "follows logically," "must be true," etc. A Justify question will use those sort of phrases, indicating that the conclusion follows from the correct answer. An Assumption question avoids those phrases, because the conclusion doesn't have to follow from the correct answer. It's the other way around - the answer follows from the conclusion!

This stem has no "if true" phrase, and it has no "follows logically" language, so it cannot be a Justify question. it asks "which one of the following IS an assumption," and that tells you what you need to know! Find the assumption, not the justification.

[lsatstudying11]

Hi!

I was wondering if another way to phrase this assumption would be something like 'not all applicants were women.' I am not sure if this would be too strong of a claim, however. Thanks in advance!

[Frank Peter]

Hi LSATStudying,

This is a defender assumption, meaning that the argument contains potentially flawed reasoning, and we have to pick an answer choice that addresses this flaw - in other words, it shows why a potential flaw isn't in fact the case.

The flaw here is that the speaker in the stimulus says that because over half of the applicants admitted to the club were women, this shows that there was no discrimination. What we need to think about here is what if the applicant pool was predominantly comprised of qualified women, yet 50% of the people admitted weren't women?

If we said that "not all applicants were women" that might not be as helpful to us as the assumption in (D), because it leave open the possibility that MORE than half of the applicants who met all of the qualifications for the club were women.

In other words, if we had 100 applicants, and 51 of them were qualified women, but only 50 qualified women were admitted, it opens the door to say that the qualified woman who was not admitted was precluded from the club based on a discriminatory process.