> Most students had no idea how to set up charts or mental
> pictures for the logic problems.
I took Introduction to Symbolic Logic my first year in college. It was a tiny class, which was a real shame. Many years later, I remember my LSAT instructor spending the first two sessions explaining, e.g., Venn diagrams to the class. I was like, "is this guy serious?" "Who could possibly need a refresher on this stuff?" But I guess I was the odd one in terms of formal exposure.
Symbolic logic should be required for every college student. I can't think of any better class for helping produce well-rounded students with solid critical thinking skills, regardless of their academic focus.
The class is easy and it has almost no direct application whatsoever. But that's the point. Every college student should be able to get through it without sweating, even if it seems initially daunting. And it has no direct application precisely because it's a distillation of some of the very basic mechanisms of rational thinking--mechanisms that everybody and everything glosses over. It's the one class that puts the really simple stuff front-and-center, which after a semester of lessons makes it so much easier to recognize the logical patterns (or lack thereof) elsewhere. Practicing logic negations for example is incredibly useful, especially in the humanities, but even in the hard sciences.
The only downside is producing more of those annoying people who apply formal logic in every context, oblivious to the limitations. But that's better than the current state of affairs, I think. And I guess those annoying people keep everybody on their toes.