Question on MCAT Psych/Soc for EK spoiler

[treeclimbingmonkey]

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Hi,
I have a question on a topic presented in an EK exam.

Is it within the topic criteria for me to know the Swedish socioeconomic index criterion? I don't recall seeing this on the AAMC study guide topic list, so it wasn't something I covered.
Here is the passage for reference:

Thanks to everyone for your help! 🙂

 

[FrameshiftAndrew]

You don't have to know anything about this. Basically, they're expecting you to infer that the researchers in the study must have used some sort of socioeconomic status measurement to assign people to class categories, and that's what "Swedish socioeconomic index" refers to.

If you consult the original article, you'll see that they do use that term: "The censuses included detailed questions about occupations and socioeconomic indicators that allowed construction of the Swedish socioeconomic index (SEI), which was used for classifying social class." Having written and edited many MCAT passages before (for third-party companies, just to be clear), I would strongly suspect that this reflects an editing issue when writing the passage, wherein an initial draft of the passage retained the term "Swedish socioeconomic index," and then it was deleted in subsequent revisions (for word count purposes or something), but they didn't cross-check the questions to make sure that they're all answerable based on the material in the passage alone.

Takeaway: don't worry about it from a content review standpoint, maybe view it as an opportunity to hone your ability to infer information, but fundamentally this discrepancy most likely reflects an editing error when writing the passage.

 

[treeclimbingmonkey]

You don't have to know anything about this. Basically, they're expecting you to infer that the researchers in the study must have used some sort of socioeconomic status measurement to assign people to class categories, and that's what "Swedish socioeconomic index" refers to.

If you consult the original article, you'll see that they do use that term: "The censuses included detailed questions about occupations and socioeconomic indicators that allowed construction of the Swedish socioeconomic index (SEI), which was used for classifying social class." Having written and edited many MCAT passages before (for third-party companies, just to be clear), I would strongly suspect that this reflects an editing issue when writing the passage, wherein an initial draft of the passage retained the term "Swedish socioeconomic index," and then it was deleted in subsequent revisions (for word count purposes or something), but they didn't cross-check the questions to make sure that they're all answerable based on the material in the passage alone.

Takeaway: don't worry about it from a content review standpoint, maybe view it as an opportunity to hone your ability to infer information, but fundamentally this discrepancy most likely reflects an editing error when writing the passage.

Ahh I see! Thank you very much!

 

[FrameshiftAndrew]

Of course 🙂. As a rule of thumb, it's way more likely that someone made a mistake in third-party materials than that a third-party company has exclusive information on some highly obscure content that is actually testable, but it never hurts to double check!

 

[PlsLetMeIn21]

Of course 🙂. As a rule of thumb, it's way more likely that someone made a mistake in third-party materials than that a third-party company has exclusive information on some highly obscure content that is actually testable, but it never hurts to double check!

LOL, sooooooo true.