PrepTest 136

[lcid:3640] Prep Test 136 LSAT — Reading Comp — S1 Reading comp

Passage

Questions 8-14  . Passage A  .        In this appeal of his criminal conviction, the  . defendant challenges the fingerprint Remaining source text redacted.
Passage walkthrough
Passage Summary

Topic: Legal Studies


Passage A

Paragraph 1

  • Paragraph note
    • Defendant’s argument
  • Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
    • Defendant - The fingerprint evidence at my trial should be discounted
    • Reasoning - There are no studies showing no two people have the same fingerprints

Paragraph 2

  • Paragraph note
    • More reasoning behind Defendant’s argument
  • Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
    • No established error rates
    • Method - No objective standards (e.g., points of identification)

Paragraph 3

  • Paragraph note
    • Author IDs herself, disagrees with Defendant
  • Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
    • Author is judge in appeals court
    • Concession - Not scientific law
    • Defendant is wrong - fingerprint evidence OK
    • Fingerprints used for 100 years
    • Concession - Better standards and testing desirable

Paragraph 4

  • Paragraph note
    • More rebutting of Defendant
  • Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
    • Concession - Different agencies have different requirements
    • Method - All examiners held to same “points and characteristics” approach
    • Regular testing and training with uniform standards
    • Trial court was right to allow evidence

Passage B

Paragraph 1

  • Paragraph note
    • Author criticizes fingerprint evidence
  • Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
    • No objective standards on when two fingerprints match
    • One method - Ridge matches, but no consensus on number
    • Another method - Holistic

Paragraph 2

  • Paragraph note
    • Questions about fingerprint reliability
  • Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
    • Question set 1 - How likely is each “number” of ridge matches?
    • Question set 2 - Partial matches being wrong?
    • No one can answer, but answers are important

Paragraph 3

  • Paragraph note
    • Question - error rate?
  • Views, minor Meta-Structures, points of intersection, and the author's attitude
    • One study - Few to no errors
    • Criticism of study - Too lax
    • Another study - 34% error rate

Main Points:

Passage A - While further testing and development of fingerprint matching is desirable, this type of evidence has a long history of being successfully used in trials, and examiners are held to high standards, so the Defendant is wrong to try to get that evidence thrown out.

Passage B - There are too many questions and not enough answers about the reliability of fingerprint evidence.

Key Lines?

Passage A:

  • Lines 3-4 - One viewpoint is defined
  • Lines 8-9; Lines 11-12 - That argument’s key elements are stated
  • Lines 21-23 - The Author identifies herself and rebuts the other viewpoint

Passage B:

  • Lines 36-37 - The Author’s viewpoint is stated (right out the gate!)
  • Lines 50-52; Lines 53-56 - Questions that undermine the implied opposing point are asked
  • Lines 61-62 - Another question that undermines the implied opposing point

Meta-Structure? Relationship Between Passages?

These passages both discuss the same topic - the reliability of fingerprint evidence. Passage A ultimately rules that such evidence is reliable enough to be admissible in a criminal trial (Lines 33-35), while the Author of Passage B brings up many questions about reliability that haven’t yet been answered (Lines 50-52; Lines 53-56; Lines 61-62). So they have different opinions on that central topic.

Question/Answer - Passage B relies a lot on questions that don’t have answers to show that fingerprint evidence just isn’t at the point where it needs to be for us to feel that it’s reliable evidence. In general, the Author’s answer to questions raised is the main point of the passage. Here, however, since the Author’s point is that there are no definitive answers to these questions, that’s the main point.

Last Thoughts?

Passage A has an Author that is more clearly defined than most authors are. While we can generally get a sense of the profession or at least field that a given author works in, here, we know that the Author is the judge in an appeals court, ruling on a Defendant’s appeal. That specificity might very well show up in a question, and it should color all of our answers that we select that reference the Author of Passage A.

Passage A actually has quite a few concessions. The Judge concedes that fingerprint identification isn’t a scientific law (Lines 24-26), it could have more consistent standards (Lines 19-21), and agencies do have different degrees of correlation required for a match (Lines 24-26). All of this means that, while she does reach a definitive conclusion, her viewpoint isn’t absolute - she believes that, while wrong, the opposing view/the Defendant has some valid points.

Passage B’s Author also has a weaker opinion than we might expect based on the overall argument. While he believes that there isn’t sufficient information to conclude fingerprint evidence is reliable, that’s not the same as saying fingerprint evidence is bad and is unreliable. His view is that more studies have to be done to determine the reliability - he may very well agree that, should it prove to be accurate a certain percentage of the time, it’s good evidence.

With these last two notes in mind, we have to be careful about what we commit the authors to, and what we say they disagree over. They both have more moderate views than might be initially apparent, so there’s more overlap in what they think might be the case than we might think.

Question prompt

Passage B differs from Remaining source text redacted.
Why the credited answer is right

Credited answer: B

The notes below walk through why it fits the stem and how to eliminate the rest.

Question Type

Legal

Strategy Overview

Head straight to the answers, using our big-picture understanding of the passages to answer it

Answer Anticipation

Comparative Author’s Attitude questions are one of those question types where you can spend time anticipating something, but the correct answer could go in many different directions, so it’s usually best to head straight to the answer choices. We already compared the passages after reading through them, so we should be able to identify an answer that lines up with what we already know about the passages without doing too much extra work.

Answer choices

  1. A
    optimistic in its conclusions
    Why choice A is not credited

    (A) (Lines 44-45; Lines 56-58; Lines 33-35) Passage B definitely has a more skeptical and pessimistic tone in discussing the reliability of fingerprint evidence as compared to Passage A, so this answer isn’t correct.

  2. B
    general in focus
    Why choice B matches the stem

    (B) (Lines 37-40; Lines 59-60; Lines 33-35) Passage B discusses the use of fingerprint evidence as the basis for identification, which could involve trials, police investigations, or even private investigations. Passage A, on the other hand, discusses it specifically in the context of a criminal trial. As such, the scope of Passage B is broader than the scope of Passage A, so this is the correct answer.

  3. C
    tentative in its claims
    Why choice C is not credited

    (C) (Lines 36-37; Lines 44-46; Lines 56-58; Line 16; Line 19; Line 24; Lines 33-35) This is a tricky trap answer. Passage A seems pretty certain that fingerprint evidence “has an exceedingly low error rate,” while Passage B argues that we don’t really know what the error rate is, so Passage B is more tentative, right? No, because Passage B is a lot more certain in the claims that it makes. According to the Author of Passage B, there is a “lack” of objective standards for evaluating fingerprints, and “no” agreed-on standards. “No” fingerprint examiner can answer “critical” questions decisively. On the other hand, the Author of Passage A brings up frequent concessions and qualifications on it’s viewpoint. Fingerprint evidence “has not attained the status of scientific law,” and “further testing and...even more consistent standards” may be desirable. Even her conclusion isn’t that the trial court was right, but rather that it was “within its discretion” - in other words, it wasn’t wrong to find what it did. So the certainty in Passage B at least matches that in Passage A, even if the conclusions they present might appear to show more certainty for the Author of Passage A.

  4. D
    respectful of opposing claims
    Why choice D is not credited

    (D) (Lines 56-58) The Author of Passage B seems a bit incredulous at the opposing point, claiming that “[n]o fingerprint examiner” can answer some basic questions about the accuracy of their methods. The Author of Passage A, on the other hand, spends half the passage summing up the opposing view, and then presents concessions to that view in her own argument (Line 16; Line 19; Line 24). As such, if anything, Passage A is more respectful towards the opposing point than Passage B is.

  5. E
    dependent on unsubstantiated assumptions
    Why choice E is not credited

    (E) Just based on the basic type of argument each passage makes, this answer should be suspicious. A claim that something is accurate will almost always rest on more assumptions than an argument that something may not be accurate. The former would have to have positive evidence that the thing is accurate and that there aren’t any errors, which is hard to show. The latter only needs to raise questions about accuracy. That’s the case here, as Passage A’s claims rest on assumptions about longevity and a certain level of objective standards being sufficient to show accuracy, while Passage B doesn’t rely on many assumptions in showing that a lack of definitive proof that fingerprint evidence is reliable means that it may not be.

What this tests

Discussion

View all discussions Start a discussion