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GMAT Sentence Correction: What Is Really Being Assessed?
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GMAT Sentence Correction questions are poorly understood by most test takers, and you can quickly improve your GMAT score by learning the proper approach to this important GMAT Verbal question type. Success in Sentence Correction begins with understanding what the authors of the GMAT, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), are really trying to test.
The GMAT exam is designed to assess skills and behaviors that are important to graduate business schools. Just to name a few:
- Creative problem solving
- Good decision making
- Critical thinking
- Hypervigilance
- Effective communication
The goal of the GMAT Verbal Reasoning section is NOT to determine who knows arcane grammar rules and unusual idiomatic structures. After all, this is not an exam used to assess qualifications for PhD programs in literature or creative writing. So why do forums on GMAT Sentence Correction frequently suggest that students memorize obscure idioms and lesser-known grammar rules? The primary reason is that people don’t understand what Sentence Correction questions are really designed to evaluate.
GMAT Sentence Correction problems use core writing and grammar skills (which you must possess to succeed in business!) to assess the attributes noted earlier—specifically, prioritized decision making and the ability to leverage every crumb of information. In business, successful managers use all available resources to make the best decisions they can, and if they don't know the correct answer to a question, they delegate it to an expert. These Sentence Correction questions are brilliantly made to assess exactly that—to see whether you are using core competencies to make informed decisions or focusing on unimportant grammatical issues for which you lack the proper expertise.
To be clear, you absolutely need a certain level of grammar knowledge to succeed in GMAT Sentence Correction, but these questions do not test obscure grammar rules in a vacuum. Most people possess the requisite grammar knowledge can acquire it quickly, but they don’t understand how to “play the SC game” properly.
The way to get better at Sentence Correction is not by wasting your time learning random grammar rules and memorizing idioms, but by doing high-quality official practice questions that allow you to improve both strategy and knowledge through each question.
GMAT Sentence Correction best practices
Given what Sentence Correction is designed to assess, there is a set of best practices that are essential to success, yet I don’t see many students using these fundamental strategies when they first start attacking this GMAT Verbal question type. These strategies, developed by our team over decades of teaching, will help you quickly eliminate incorrect answers and avoid the mistakes that these questions are designed to elicit.
1. Always do a quick scan of answer choices before reading the original sentence
Certain differences in the answers can tell you immediately what to consider when reading the sentence and make you much more efficient in your analysis. For instance, if answers differ in terms of subject verb agreement or modifiers, you will know to assess that in your initial reading. Without this quick scan, you must notice any errors in the original answer choice in a vacuum, something that is much harder to do.
2. Use process of elimination only
Most students prefer to select the answer choice that they like the best and that sounds most pleasing to their ear—a sure recipe for disaster on difficult GMAT Sentence Correction questions. Almost all harder questions have something unusual in the correct answer with which you might not be comfortable: weird word order, obscure idioms, rhetorical devices that seem to break defined grammar “rules,” etc. You may not like the correct answer in these cases, but there will be defined and concrete reasons why the other four answer choices are wrong—find those reasons and eliminate answers accordingly until you are left with one correct answer.
3. Once you have eliminated a few answer choices, make sure to carefully leverage every clue provided by the differences in the remaining answer choices
Those clues are the only way you will get hard Sentence Correction questions correct. Ask yourself: “Why have I been given this choice of word placement or grammatical structure?” It is common in hard Sentence Correction problems that virtually no one—even top grammar experts—would realize that an incorrect answer is wrong until the correct answer choice is put beside it. Analyzing every little hint that is given by differences in the answers is the key on this GMAT Verbal question type, yet students rarely do that effectively.
Sample Sentence Correction question
To show these best practices in action, let’s determine the correct answer to a full official problem. First, can you find any grammatical errors in the original answer choice on its own?
Even their most ardent champions concede that no less than a technical or scientific breakthrough is necessary before solar cells can meet the goal of providing one percent of the nation’s energy needs.
Probably not! It uses a common construction you have seen in your years of writing and reading—“No less than…”—and there are no overt grammatical errors. However, let’s now look at the full Sentence Correction question, which you can try on your own first. (My discussion comes after the question.)
Even their most ardent champions concede that no less than a technical or scientific breakthrough is necessary before solar cells can meet the goal of providing one percent of the nation’s energy needs.
(A) that no less than a technical or scientific breakthrough is necessary
(B) that nothing other than a technical or scientific breakthrough is needed
(C) that a technical or scientific breakthrough is necessary
(D) the necessity for an occurrence of a technical or scientific breakthrough
(E) the necessity for a technical or scientific breakthrough occurring
With a quick scan of the answers, you should see that answer choice (C) eliminates the “no less than” and “nothing other than” phrases seen in the first two answer choices. Anytime an answer choice eliminates a word or series of words, you should wonder if perhaps those words are redundant or superfluous (just remember—those words might be essential to the meaning, making the longer answer correct). Without such a hint, these redundancies are hard to notice.
In this problem, if you say that a particular breakthrough is necessary, that already means that something “less than that” breakthrough will not suffice. The terms “no less than” and “nothing other than” are already embedded in the words “necessary/needed,” so they are redundant and thus incorrect. Thus, you can eliminate answer choices (A) and (B) as incorrect.
For answer choices (D) and (E), there is another redundant structure that you can find by comparing those choices to (C): a “breakthrough” is already an “occurrence”, so including those words in (D) and (E) is completely unnecessary. If you remove “an occurrence” or “occurring,” the meaning remains the same. While there are additional issues with (D) and (E), the overt redundancy allows you to eliminate them confidently.
The important takeaway from this problem is that you probably would not find the error in (A) on your own, but the correct answer, (C), gives it away quite quickly if you play the game properly.
A few parting thoughts regarding this question and good Sentence Correction strategy overall:
- Many errors in Sentence Correction relate to the meaning of the sentence, not overt grammatical rules. The correct answer must convey a logical, unambiguous meaning and avoid redundancies and unacceptable diction choices. The most difficult GMAT Sentence Correction questions are testing meaning, not overt grammatical errors such as improper subject verb agreement or illogical modification.
- Learn from every problem and only do official SC questions. A vast majority of unofficial SC questions are flawed in one way or another, and using unofficial questions will only waste time in your GMAT prep. If you get an official SC question incorrect, make sure you understand why. If it was an issue of knowledge, learn that grammatical error or structure from the problem. If it was an issue of strategy, then analyze what you did wrong in attacking the problem and look out for the particular “set-up” in the future.
- The good news: if you employ good strategy and recognize what is really being assessed in these questions, the game of Sentence Correction becomes much easier than it first appears and your GMAT Verbal score will jump considerably.