Logical Reasoning
Course of Action
3,691 words, 9 sections. The first two are free.
The opening sections
Definitions first, then the reasoning. Each section is short enough to read in one sitting.
Course of Action is the fifth unit of Logical Reasoning in the PMDC MDCAT-2025 uniform curriculum, and its three outcomes ask the student to gather the different parts of the information, use that information to make a decision, and judge competing courses of action by argument. Logical Reasoning is worth 9 of the 180 marks, and this chapter accounts for 26 distinct questions across 18 official papers between 2022 and 2026 at a mean item difficulty of 2.5, with 388 active questions in the practice bank. Situation Analysis and Problem Resolution holds 11 of the 26 questions, Decision Making and Action Planning holds 9, and Statement-Assumption and Statement-Conclusion holds 6 up to 2025. A student who has this material can read a short statement of a problem, test each offered action for relevance and proportion, and name the one that would actually help.
The stem hands over a short statement of a problem and one or two suggested courses of action, and asks which of them logically follows or needs to be followed. The instruction to assume everything in the statement true is doing real work: it closes the world, so an action is judged only against the words on the page and not against a fact the student happens to know. A course of action is not tested as a good idea in the abstract but against three questions, all of which must be answered yes. Does it address this problem? Is it practical to carry out? Is it proportionate to the problem it is meant to solve? A fourth question sits behind them: does the action actually follow from the statement, or does it need information the statement never supplied?
The examiner writes distractors that fail exactly one of these tests, which is why so many wrong options read like sensible sentences. An action can be wise in general and still fail the stem, because the stem asks about one specific problem, not about good policy. The student who judges an option by how reasonable it sounds, rather than by whether it speaks to the stated problem, is the student the distractors are written for.
When two actions are offered, they are frequently complementary: one works on the supply of a problem and the other on the people affected, and both follow. But complementarity is not the same as addition, and an option fails the moment one of its two halves fails, however good the other is.
7 more sections in this chapter
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