The proportion of men among students enrolled in nursing or medical as

Step 1: Identify the question type.

This question type is asking us what information would be useful for evaluating the information here. Kaplan considers this question type to be a hybrid strengthen-weaken problem, and we will act accordingly, analyzing the prompt for its assumptions.

Step 2: Untangle the stimulus.

First, we need to understand the author's conclusion. In this case, it's the first sentence: he is arguing that the proportion of males among nursing students has increased.

Then, we need to pin down his evidence. He bases this claim on two statistics: the percent of men enrolled in nursing school in two different years three decades apart.

Finally, we need to identify the author's assumption--and the key here is a very subtle scope shift. Both his evidence and his conclusion deal with a proportion of men nursing. However, his conclusion is bout the proportion of men that makes up the nursing field, while his evidence is about the proportion of nurses that make up the general population of men!

In other words, he doesn't actually give us any information on the proportion within the field of nursing. He tells us only that a larger number of a (presumably) larger population of men are nurses.

Step 3: Predict the answer.

So there are more men--does that make up a larger percentage of the whole? Well, we need to know, then, how many women there are. If the number of women has remained constant while the number of men increased, clearly the proportion changed. However, if there are just more nurses--if lots more women are studying nursing in 1965 than in 1995--it's entirely possible the proportion has remained unchanged.

Step 4: Evaluate the answer choices.

We're looking for information on women enrolled in nursing programs, and that's what D offers us.