Don’t Let Reality Get In the Way of Your GMAT or EA, Part 1: Sentence Correction
A few years ago, one of my favorite former GMAT students in Germany read an article about the United States presidential election in The Economist. She found the article’s content alarming, and sent it over to me. I won't comment on the content here, since we try to keep this website purely apolitical. But for whatever it’s worth, the article was wonderfully well-written – as is usually the case in The Economist.
And then I started thinking: you know, this article contains a bunch of phrases that would count as “errors” in GMAT or Executive Assessment sentence correction questions. A few examples:
ECONOMIST GMAT SC “ERROR” #1
This was a transformative moment in the history of one of the world’s great political parties, but it hardly seemed so to those enjoying Cleveland’s evening sunshine while the roll call of state delegates concluded inside.
The pronoun “it” should always catch your eye on the GMAT or EA, but I think it’s OK from a sentence correction perspective in this particular case: “it” seems to refer to “moment”.
However, the word “this” is more clearly problematic – it’s used as a pronoun here. On GMAT or EA SC questions, “this” seems to be used exclusively as an article in correct answer choices – check out this SC thread for an example, though there are obviously more important issues in the question.
ECONOMIST GMAT SC “ERROR” #2
Violent crime has fallen by more than half over the past 20 years, the economy is growing at a steady, unspectacular rate, illegal border crossings are at a low level, there are signs of racial progress for those who want to see them.
Technically, this is a comma splice: there are four independent clauses in the sentence, separated only by commas. From a GMAT or EA perspective, the sentence would be much better if the commas were replaced with semicolons, at the very least.
An official GMAT question with a similar comma splice error can be found here -- though again, the question contains plenty of other issues.
ECONOMIST GMAT SC “ERROR” #3
Mr Wilson says that the clashes between Trump supporters and protesters in Chicago in March—when Mr Trump announced and then cancelled a rally in a heavily African-American neighbourhood—moved the Cruz campaign polls away from their candidate towards Mr Trump by ten points almost overnight.
This is a good case of a subtle GMAT SC pronoun error.
Check out the phrase “moved the Cruz campaign polls away from their candidate.” “Their” always refers to a plural noun in GMAT or EA sentence correction questions, and the only plural noun nearby is “polls.” So if we read the sentence strictly and literally, it’s saying “…the clashes… moved the Cruz campaign polls away from the polls’ candidate towards Mr. Trump…” And that doesn’t make sense.
On GMAT or Executive Assessment sentence correction questions, this is clearly an error – even though we easily understand the author’s point in real life.
ECONOMIST GMAT SC “ERROR” #4
As voters get even more fed up with this election they may decide that both candidates are as bad as each other, or merely decide to roll the dice out of boredom. If that happens, it would be the most absent-minded political revolution in American history.
In the last sentence, both “that” and “it” are, in theory, being used as singular pronouns. Trouble is, neither has a clear referent in the previous sentence – in some sense, the author is using “that” and “it” to refer to general ideas expressed earlier in the article.
That definitely wouldn’t fly on an actual GMAT or EA SC question. (And yes, I just made exactly the same "error" in the previous sentence. But you understood what I meant, right?)
BONUS ECONOMIST GMAT SC “ERROR” #5
And here’s a bonus from another Economist article:
First, she [Theresa May] intends to include a Great Repeal Act in next year’s Queen’s Speech. This will revoke the 1972 European Communities Act (ECA), the legislation that took Britain into the club and which channels European laws onto British statute books, from the point of Brexit.
GMAC – the creators of both the GMAT and EA – would likely argue that there are two more errors in the second sentence. “This” is used as a pronoun, and that’s a no-no on GMAT and EA sentence correction, as discussed above.
The second error is a little bit more subtle: “which” can only be used as a non-essential modifier, so it doesn’t really work to say “the legislation that took Britain… and which channels…” Don’t lose sleep over that one – sure, the use of “which” is frequently tested on the GMAT and EA, but not generally in this format.
Anyway, here’s my point: please don’t let reality get in the way of your performance on GMAT or Executive Assessment sentence correction questions. I love The Economist, and I think that the writers of both articles are obviously talented. But according to GMAT and EA “rules”, the writers would presumably perform somewhat poorly on sentence correction questions.
So who do you think is correct: the writers and editors at The Economist magazine, or the creators of the GMAT? Personally, I would argue that language is a vibrant, living thing, and a major international news magazine with millions of readers probably has a pretty darned good idea of what “correct” modern English is. The GMAT and EA are arguably stuck in the past, and the exams are still testing some of the same, arcane rules – often in a very narrow way – that were tested when GMAT sentence correction was first invented several decades ago.
So the bad news is that sentence correction features (arguably) obsolete rules, often tested in a way that doesn’t reflect the realities of modern English. But the exams’ rigidity can be a good thing for test-takers: if you learn the concepts that are most frequently tested on sentence correction, you’ll be on your way to a solid GMAT or EA verbal score. I’d even argue that sentence correction might be the most “beatable” or “learnable” part of the GMAT exam, as long as you’re willing to put in the time and work.
Just make sure that you stick with the EA and GMAT’s sometimes-narrow way of thinking about language on sentence correction – and don’t let reality or the excellent writers at The Economist throw you off track.