Week 7 — Quiz (auto-graded) · Social Stratification & Class

Course: Introduction to Sociology (SOC 1) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Adeyemi
Objective tested: Objective 5 — stratification systems; caste vs. class; income vs. wealth; poverty; Marx vs. Weber; Davis-Moore vs. conflict; meritocracy; reading income data.
Points: 10 (1 each) · Assignment group: Quizzes (10% of grade) · Due: end of Module 7.

This is the human-readable quiz with its vetted answer key and feedback. The import-ready Classic QTI is in F-quiz-week-07-qti.xml. The reusable item-bank entries and the Canvas placement block are at the bottom of this file. (Heads-up: Week 7 is the last week the Midterm (Week 8) covers — these items also feed the midterm bank.)

Blueprint

No trick questions; distractors target the Week 7 misconceptions named in the lecture outline (income vs. wealth, caste vs. class, Davis-Moore vs. conflict, Marx vs. Weber, meritocracy fact vs. ideology, correlation vs. causation).

Questions, key, and feedback

Q1 (MC). Social stratification is best defined as —
- A. the personal choices that make one individual richer than another
- B. a society's system of ranking categories of people into a hierarchy with an unequal distribution of resources ✅
- C. the natural tendency of talented people to rise to the top
- D. the study of how the human body is layered into tissues and organs
Feedback: Stratification is a society-wide system that ranks categories of people (not lucky vs. unlucky individuals) and distributes resources unequally. (A reframes it as individual choice — the error the sociological imagination corrects; C smuggles in a contested meritocracy claim; D is biology.)

Q2 (MC). Maria and Devon each earned $65,000 in wages this year. Maria owns a paid-off home and has $180,000 in savings; Devon rents and owes $35,000 in student loans. They are equal in income but differ greatly in wealth. The best statement of the income–wealth distinction is —
- A. income is what you own; wealth is what you earn each year
- B. income is a flow (money received over a period); wealth is a stock (assets minus debts) ✅
- C. income and wealth are two words for the same thing
- D. wealth is always exactly ten times a person's income
Feedback: Income is a flow (earnings per period); wealth (net worth) is a stock (everything owned minus owed). Two people with identical income can have very different wealth. (A reverses the definitions; C erases the week's key distinction; D invents a fixed ratio.)

Q3 (Multiple answer — select all that apply). Which of the following describe WEALTH (a stock — what someone owns minus what they owe) rather than income (a flow)? Select all that apply.
- A. The equity a family holds in a paid-off house ✅
- B. A worker's monthly paycheck
- C. The current value of a person's stock and retirement investments ✅
- D. The interest a savings account pays out each year
- E. A person's total savings minus their outstanding debts ✅
Feedback: Wealth is accumulated assets net of debt (A, C, E — home equity, investment holdings, net savings). A paycheck (B) and the interest paid out each year (D) are income — money received over a period (a flow). The week's signature distinction.

Q4 (MC). A sociologist contrasts two stratification systems: in the first, your rank is ascribed at birth and essentially fixed for life; in the second, your rank is based on economic position and is, in principle, changeable. These two systems are, respectively —
- A. a class system and a caste system
- B. a caste system (closed) and a class system (open) ✅
- C. an estate system and a slavery system
- D. a meritocracy and an absolute-poverty system
Feedback: Caste = closed (rank fixed at birth, no movement); class = open (rank can change, at least in principle). (A reverses the pair; "how open a class system really is" is then an empirical mobility question.)

Q5 (Matching). Match each theorist or thesis to its core idea about stratification.
| Theorist / thesis | Correct core idea |
|---|---|
| Karl Marx | Class is defined by one's relationship to the means of production — owners (bourgeoisie) vs. workers (proletariat) |
| Max Weber | Stratification is multidimensional — class, status (prestige), and party (power) — and shapes life chances |
| The Davis-Moore thesis | Stratification is functional: unequal rewards motivate talented people to fill the most important, hardest-to-fill positions |
| The conflict view | Stratification is largely exploitation and the reproduction of advantage, serving those with power |
Feedback: Marx → two classes (own vs. work). Weber → multidimensional (class/status/party; life chances). Davis-Moore → the functionalist "rewards motivate talent" thesis (Davis & Moore, 1945). Conflict → stratification reproduces advantage and serves the powerful. A common mix-up is crediting class/status/party to Marx — it's Weber.

Q6 (MC). According to the Davis-Moore thesis, why do societies attach greater rewards (pay, prestige) to some positions than to others?
- A. because the people in those positions seized power and rigged the rules in their favor
- B. because some positions are more functionally important and harder to fill, so greater rewards motivate qualified people to take them on ✅
- C. because everyday interactions assign prestige to certain jobs for no real reason
- D. because wealth, unlike income, is inherited across generations
Feedback: The Davis-Moore thesis (Davis & Moore, 1945) is the functionalist claim that unequal rewards are an incentive to draw scarce, trained talent into the most important roles. (A is the conflict critique; C is an interactionist angle; D is a true statement about wealth but not the Davis-Moore claim.) Note Tumin's (1953) critique: who decides "importance," and inequality can block talent — present both fairly.

Q7 (MC). An old aristocratic family has a revered name and high social honor but relatively little cash, while a recent lottery winner has money but little social prestige. This shows that — in Weber's view — stratification has more than one dimension. The dimension capturing prestige and social honor is —
- A. class
- B. status ✅
- C. party
- D. caste
Feedback: In Weber's scheme, class = economic position, status = prestige/social honor, and party = power. The aristocrat is high in status but lower in class; they can come apart. (Caste is a system of stratification, not one of Weber's three dimensions.)

Q8 (MC). The U.S. Census Bureau reported that real median household income was $80,610 in 2023. Which interpretation of this figure is correct?
- A. It is the average income of the wealthiest U.S. households.
- B. It is the income of the household exactly in the middle of the distribution — half of households earned more, half less — and it measures income (a flow), not wealth. ✅
- C. It proves that every household's income rose that year.
- D. It is the total amount of wealth the typical household owns.
Feedback: Median = the middle of the distribution (half above, half below), and median household income measures income (a flow) — not wealth, and not an average. A single median also hides the spread and, by itself, can't tell you what caused any year-to-year change. (Source: Census Bureau, Income in the United States: 2023.)

Q9 (True / False). "The official U.S. poverty rate fell from one year to the next. This change, by itself, proves that a particular government policy caused the decline."
- True
- False ✅
Feedback: False. A year-over-year change in a rate is a correlation in time, not proof of causation — many things move at once (the labor market, policy, measurement). A descriptive statistic describes; it rarely isolates a cause on its own. "Correlation is a clue, not a verdict."

Q10 (MC). A commentator insists that "in this country, anyone who works hard enough will get ahead." A sociologist notes that, true or not, this belief can make existing inequality feel fair and deserved and can justify the current arrangement. The sociologist is treating meritocracy as a —
- A. proven empirical fact about social mobility
- B. closed stratification system like caste
- C. legitimating ideology ✅
- D. measure of absolute poverty
Feedback: A legitimating ideology is a widely held belief that justifies an existing arrangement and makes inequality feel deserved — regardless of whether the society is actually that open. Sociologists treat meritocracy both as a claim to test (with mobility data) and as an ideology that can defend stratification. (B and D misuse other Week-7 terms.)

Answer key (quick reference)

Quality gate (self-checked): each single-answer item has exactly one correct option; the multiple-answer item (Q3) keys the three wealth/stock items (A, C, E) and requires the two income/flow items (B, D) to be left unselected; the matching item (Q5) pairs four prompts to four distinct ideas. Every theorist/thesis is named factually — Marx (means of production; bourgeoisie/proletariat), Weber (class/status/party; life chances), the Davis-Moore thesis (Kingsley Davis & Wilbert Moore, 1945), Tumin's critique (1953) — verified against the source (OpenStax Introduction to Sociology 3e §9.4). The one published figure used (Q8) — real median household income $80,610 in 2023 — was verified live at the U.S. Census Bureau (Income in the United States: 2023, Report P60-282, published Sep 10, 2024) before this quiz shipped; Q8 keys the reading of that figure (income, a flow; the middle of the distribution), not a computation. The correlation-vs-causation item (Q9) is keyed False and uses a poverty-rate scenario (the real 2023 official rate of 11.1% is documented at the Census, but Q9 makes no claim about a specific year's number — it tests the inference). No correlation is presented as causation anywhere in the quiz.

Item-bank entries (for variants + the midterm/final)

All ten items are tagged course=SOC1 · week=7 · objective=5 · topic=stratification-and-class and deposited in Item Bank: Week 7 — Social Stratification & Class. The midterm (Week 8) — which covers W1–7 — and the per-term variant updates draw fresh items from this bank. (Tags: q1 stratification-def, q2 income-vs-wealth, q3 wealth-stock-multi, q4 caste-vs-class, q5 theorists-match, q6 davis-moore, q7 weber-status, q8 read-median-income, q9 correlation-causation, q10 meritocracy-ideology.)

Canvas placement block

canvas_object   = Quizzes::Quiz
title           = "Week 7 Quiz — Social Stratification & Class"
assignment_group = "Quizzes"
points_possible = 10
grading_type    = points
due_offset_days = 6        # 6 days after module start
published       = true
shuffle_answers = true
provenance      = "~ Prof. Adeyemi's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com"