Exercise 2: Why "Peer Review Is Worthless" Overreaches Bohannon's Sting — Possible Solution
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The classmate's conclusion generalizes from a study that was
deliberately scoped to test only one specific tier of publishing:
open-access journals, and specifically ones already suspected of being
predatory. The sting never submitted the fake paper to any
subscription-based journal, so it produced no real data at all about
how traditional peer review would have handled the same submission.

Without that comparison group, there's no way to know from this study
alone whether a 51% acceptance rate (157 of 304) is a problem specific
to predatory-style open-access publishing, or whether it would be
similarly high (or different) at subscription journals too. The real
finding the sting actually supports is narrower and still serious: a
large number of open-access journals that present themselves as
peer-reviewed will accept an obviously flawed paper. It does not, on
its own, support the sweeping claim that peer review as a whole -
across all of scholarly publishing - is worthless.

This is a direct, real-world example of the kind of overreach Chapter
1 warned about: taking a real, well-documented finding and stretching
its conclusion further than the actual data supports.

ANSWER: The sting only tested open-access journals with no
subscription-journal comparison group, so it can only support a claim
about that specific tier of publishing, not about peer review in
general. Concluding that all peer review is worthless overreaches what
a study with no control group can actually demonstrate.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This directly uses the chapter's own stated "honest limitation" (no
control group) to explain precisely why the broader claim isn't
supported, rather than just restating that the sting happened.