Q14 - In a study, six medical students

[Laura Damone]

Question Type:
Inference (Most Strongly Supported)

Stimulus Breakdown:
Okay, there's a lot of text here but the facts themselves are pretty straightforward. Medical students in an experiment each saw the same patient and were each asked a different leading question by an attending physician to rule out a different medical condition. When they saw a similar patient a week later, they were asked for a diagnosis by a different attending physician, this time with no leading questions, and each began by testing the diagnosis they had been led towards in the first half of the experiment.

Answer Anticipation:
This evidence suggests that the students are taking their experience in week 1 and carrying it over into their practice on week 2.

Correct answer:
A

Answer choice analysis:
(A) Hmm…this doesn't match our prephrase, but it does seem like it must be true. In week 1, each student was asked to rule out a different diagnosis, and in week 2, each student returned to that diagnosis as their starting point. Looks like a winner!

(B) Totally unsupported.

(C) Also totally unsupported.

(D) Nope. We never learn whether the actual cause was among those the attending physician in week 1 led the students to.

(E) No again. We know that the medical students began by testing for the diagnosis suggested in week 1. But we don't know that they ended there.

Takeaway/Pattern:
Don't be intimidated by long stimuli. They're typically pretty straightforward. And don't get worried if you don't see your prephrase for a Most Strongly Supported question among the answers. Stay flexible, and evaluate each answer on its own merit.

#officialexplanation

[JackelineZ38]

Could someone explain why A is the correct answer? I'm having trouble seeing how specifically "none" of the medical students began by testing the same diagnosis as other medical students. Couldn't it be that two medical students, one in error, provided the wrong diagnosis/test?

[Laura Damone]

We're told that each student was presented with a different potential diagnosis by the attending physician in week 1. We're also told that in week 2, each student started by returning to the diagnosis presented to them in week 1. Since they were different in week 1, we can conclude that each student began with a different diagnosis in week 2. Make sense?

[RichardW764]

Hard answer for me!

[JoseM449]

cool