A Remark on the Rank Conjecture

We prove a result about the action of -operations on the homology of linear groups. We use this to give a sharper formulation of the rank conjecture as well as some shorter proofs of various known results. We formulate a conjecture about how the sharper formulation of the rank conjecture together with another conjecture could give rise to a different point of view on the isomorphism between and K_n^{(p)} (F)$ for an infinite field F, and we prove part of this new conjecture.