A benefits-eligibility step applies six interacting conditions, and errors cluster on cases where several conditions apply at once. The team added an instruction to think step by step, and accuracy improved, but the downstream system now fails to parse the decision because it is buried in prose. What is the best fix?

Answer: C — Have the model reason in a tagged analysis section and emit the decision in a separate structured section

(c) is right: separating reasoning from a structured answer keeps the accuracy gain and gives the parser one reliable place to read. (a) throws away a measured improvement on a genuinely multi-step task. (b) is brittle; phrases like 'not eligible' or a restated condition will break it. (d) still leaves the decision embedded in prose and may cut the reasoning that produced the gain.