Beginner’s Guide to Executive Assessment Sentence Correction

This post is dedicated to the literally dozens of Executive Assessment test-takers who have asked us this question, both in EA tutoring sessions and online:

“The moment we see an SC question. What should be the approach?”

If you open 20 different SC guides, you’ll probably see 20 different answers to that question. You’ll also see 4,000 different idioms, 392 different grammar rules, and 10,000 kilograms of grammar jargon. Approximately.

All of that stuff is fine. You’ll definitely need a basic understanding of grammar, or else Sentence Correction will be pretty tough. But the #1 problem we see from our incoming private Executive Assessment tutoring students is that they’ve memorized piles of grammar rules, and those won’t necessarily help you figure out what, exactly, you should do when an actual Sentence Correction question pops up on the screen.

So here’s our attempt to cut through the noise with a simple, effective, “baseline” approach to Sentence Correction, based on our decades of experience as EA and GMAT tutors. This post comes with a friendly warning: sorry, this one is long!

The EA tests “verbal reasoning”, not “grammar and reading”

A few years ago, I attended a psychometrics conference that was dominated by academics and geeky employees of standardized testing organizations, including ETS (makers of the GRE® and TOEFL) and GMAC (creators of your beloved GMAT and EA). I watched a presentation by a high-ranking GMAC psychometrician, who discussed… um, some geeky stuff that doubles as a sleep aid.

Afterwards, an audience member asked something about the “math section of the GMAT.” The GMAC psychometrician interrupted him politely: “Pardon me,” GMAC guy said, “there is no math section on the GMAT. There’s only quantitative reasoning on the GMAT.”

I probably rolled my eyes. “What a dork,” I thought, “why would he make a big deal out of that? It’s math. Whatever, dude.”

Sure, maybe the GMAC psychometrician had chosen a goofy time to make a fuss about terminology, but he absolutely had a point. If you think of the quant section as only “math”, you might ignore the fact that there’s a ton of logic rolled into GMAT quant problems. You won’t succeed if you’re just regurgitating math formulas: you have to actually do some reasoning to get an elite score on the GMAT quant section. (And yes, maybe you’ve seen this particular GMAT psychometrician story before.)

The same thing is true of the Executive Assessment verbal section, arguably even more so than on the GMAT quant section. You can’t just regurgitate rules and formulas if you want to succeed in this section. There is no “reading and grammar” section on the EA: it’s called “verbal reasoning.”

And unfortunately, to reach an elite level on Sentence Correction, you have to think of the EA as a “reasoning” test, not as a grammar exam.

So yes, you need to understand some basic grammar in order to achieve elite results on Sentence Correction. But grammar alone won’t get you to a great EA score.

Setting priorities on EA sentence correction

The key to success on Sentence Correction isn’t knowing every single rule in the English language. You need to know enough about the most frequently tested rules, and then the really important thing is knowing what to prioritize when a Sentence Correction question appears on the screen during your EA exam.

English offers an endless supply of exciting-sounding things like gerunds, adjectival modifiers, progressive tenses, and absolute phrases. English even has a glorious array of around 25,000 idioms, and you probably don’t want to waste your time trying to memorize them, even though many tutors and test-prep companies encourage you to try.

Sure, you could go ahead and learn every bit of grammar you can find. But here’s how it can hurt you on the EA: when you see an actual Sentence Correction question, do you start by thinking about a random grammar rule, or are you able to cut straight to the MOST IMPORTANT things in the sentence? Or does your brain just logjam entirely, because it’s been overstuffed with Sentence Correction rules and jargon and idioms?

So if you’ve already maximized your grammar knowledge, without actually maximizing your Sentence Correction results, then you probably need to simplify your approach, and focus on the most important things first. To succeed on Sentence Correction, you’ll want to begin by executing flawlessly. We have a two-step process for exactly that.

Step 1: Find DEFINITE Sentence Correction grammar errors first

The first step you should always take on Executive Assessment sentence correction is eliminating any answer choices that contain DEFINITE errors.

What do we mean by that? If you’re certain, for example, that a pronoun has no logical referent, or that the subject of a sentence doesn’t agree with the verb, or that a modifier is misplaced, then cross the offending answer choice out. Sounds simple enough, right?

But as EA tutors, we see mistakes with this process literally every single day: some test-takers will begin by eliminating Sentence Correction answer choices because they “don’t sound good” or because they’re “wordy” or because “the comparison sounds awkward.” If you start with any of these things, all of which are essentially opinions and not rules, you’re making a huge mistake.

Similarly, if you start by eliminating answer choices based on an “EA grammar rule” that you aren’t certain is actually a rule, that’s a big mistake, too. Be conservative at first: if you don’t know for CERTAIN that an answer choice is wrong, keep it until you really are certain.

So the key is to start with the most straightforward, frequently tested Sentence Correction concepts. The following are topics that will give you the most bang for your buck on sentence correction, either because they’re based on very mechanical grammar rules, or because the EA simply loves to test them:

1. pronouns (it, they, that, those, etc.)
2. modifiers (that, which, “-ing”, “-ed”, etc.)
3. parallelism, including special parallelism triggers (both/and, either/or, not/but)
4. basic comparisons, especially phrases that use “like,” “unlike”, or “as”
5. subject-verb agreement
6. verb tenses, but especially past perfect tense
7. a few other minor-but-straightforward topics: semicolons, “due to”, and countable vs. non-countable modifiers

 

As a first step to success on Sentence Correction, you’ll want to understand these topics thoroughly, and more importantly, you’ll want to make sure that these jump off the page at you whenever you see them on the exam. If you fail to notice “it” or “they” or “which” or “that” or “and” when they appear in a sentence, you might miss some very easy questions. And on an adaptive test such as the EA, you’re in big trouble if you miss even a few easy questions.

If you master these seven topics, you’ll be able to eliminate roughly half of the wrong answer choices on Sentence Correction. To be fair, that’s just a very rough estimate: some official questions, like this one, are based solely on those seven topics. But in other questions, those seven topics are lamentably useless.

 

So these seven topics aren’t everything on Sentence Correction, but they’re always the most efficient place to start.

Step 2: Compare remaining Sentence Correction choices based on meaning

OK, so what should you do once you’ve eliminated everything you can based on clear, definite rules?

Remember our mantra: the section is called EA “verbal reasoning,” not EA “grammar and reading.” So once you’ve found every DEFINITE grammar error you can, your next job is to figure out how to give the sentence the most logical meaning.

Here’s the basic idea: compare the remaining pairs of answer choices, and identify the EXACT differences between each pair. Then think about whether those differences are going to impact the meaning in some way. Of course, that part gets really subtle and tricky, and it’s different on every sentence correction question.

Here are a few shortened examples, adapted from EA SC questions:

Companies in the United States are providing job training and general education for nearly eight million people, about equal to those who are enrolled in the nation’s four-year colleges and universities.

1. equal to those who are enrolled in

2. as many as are enrolled in

option #1 is literally saying that the 8 million people in job training programs are “equal to the people who are enrolled in four-year colleges and universities.” That’s not grammatically wrong at all! And it seems to be a very nice sentiment about equality among people with different educational backgrounds.

But that’s really not what this EA sentence is trying to say: in option #2, it’s clear that we’re comparing the number of people in each group, not making a statement about how one group of people is “equal to” the other.

Here, have another one:

Some buildings that were destroyed or heavily damaged in the earthquake last year had been constructed in violation of the city’s building code.

1. Some buildings that were destroyed or heavily damaged in the earthquake last year had been
2. Last year some of the buildings that were destroyed or heavily damaged in the earthquake had been

This one is interesting, because the only real difference is the placement of the phrase “last year.” In option #1, “last year” is right next to “earthquake,” and it seems to be telling us that the earthquake occurred last year. That seems reasonable.

But option #2 subtly expresses the wrong idea. “Last year” is right at the beginning of the sentence, suggesting that the entire first clause is the thing that happened last year: “some of the buildings… [modifier blah blah]… had been constructed in violation of the city’s building code.” But that doesn’t make sense: the buildings weren’t constructed last year, they were destroyed last year.

Let’s do one more:

In the mid-1920’s the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company was the scene of an intensive series of experiments that investigated changes in working conditions’ effects on workers’ performance.

1. that investigated changes in working conditions’ effects on workers’ performance
2. investigating the effects that changes in working conditions would have on workers’ performance

This one is also pretty subtle. There are plenty of little differences here (“that investigated changes” vs. “investigating”; use of conditional “would have”), and it’s easy to get distracted.

But here’s the important difference that really impacts the meaning: option #1 says that the company investigated changes in the (working conditions’) effects, not changes in the working conditions themselves. Nasty! (Welcome to the Executive Assessment.) option #2 “sounds wordier”, but the meaning is much more reasonable: the experiments apparently changed the working conditions, and then the experiments investigated the effects of those changes on worker performance.

And we could go on and on with more examples. The bottom line: getting better at distinguishing between the meaning of two sentences is a difficult thing, since no two questions will test exactly the same content and meaning. But unfortunately, there’s no way around it: to achieve an elite EA score, you’ll have to get pretty good at finding the strict, LITERAL differences in meaning between two or more answer choices.

For a deeper dive on exactly this skill, check out How to Approach Meaning-Based Sentence Correction on the EA.

Your ear is your enemy on EA sentence correction!

Now that we’ve discussed what you should do when you’re getting started on Sentence Correction, let’s talk about what you shouldn’t do.

For starters, you should NEVER rely on your ear, unless you have absolutely no other options. When Sentence Correction was first developed in the 1980s for the GMAT, globalization hadn’t really taken off yet, and the test’s creators certainly weren’t trying to torment non-native speakers. Sentence correction was designed to punish test-takers who relied on their ear, and that hasn’t changed at all.

Let’s face it: a huge percentage of correct sentences sound like hot garbage. Many of them are just too damned long and convoluted. They’re often messy, wordy, and awkward.

And yes, the official explanations from GMAC for a Sentence Correction question often use the words “wordy” or “awkward”, but those are subjective terms. If you dismiss an answer choice based on them, you’re basically “using your ear” or relying on instincts, rather than engaging in methodical, disciplined verbal reasoning. And that’s incredibly dangerous, because what “sounds awkward” to you might not be awkward in the eyes of the Executive Assessment.

So keep your ear out of it! Remember: the section is called “Verbal Reasoning”, not “ooh, this one sounds pretty good.”

 

For more on why your instincts can mislead you, see Don’t Let Reality Get in the Way of Your EA: Sentence Correction.

What about other grammar rules?

By now, you might be thinking: “Hang on, GMAT Ninja tutor people. I’ve studied tons of other things about Sentence Correction, like passive voice and gerunds and idioms and punctuation. They’re useful. I’ve even read posts about them on GMAT Club. Hey wait, Ninja tutor weirdos, you WROTE some of those posts, you bleeping lunatics! And now you’re saying that they don’t matter on the Executive Assessment?!?”

Easy there, cowboy. We’re not saying that they don’t matter. We’re saying that if you’re just getting started with Sentence Correction, or if your scores are stagnant after cramming tons of grammar into your head, then memorizing more rules and more jargon and more idioms won’t necessarily help.

Again, here’s what’s really important:

1. Your ability to immediately recognize the most straightforward, frequently-tested rules as soon as you see any Sentence Correction question. If an answer choice features a basic grammar topic, like parallelism or pronouns or modifier placement, then you absolutely can’t afford to miss it.
2. Whether you can accurately understand the EXACT differences in meaning among the remaining choices. And all of the grammar rules in the world won’t help you much with this part of the Executive Assessment.

If memorizing more rules distracts you from these two tasks, or worse, just causes an epic brain logjam, then memorization isn’t a great use of your time when you’re studying for the Executive Assessment.

So if you want to learn additional, “minor” grammar rules and if you’re able to use them wisely, that’s great: keep going! Just don’t let your quest for more grammar knowledge distract you from the important stuff that really drives your success on Sentence Correction.

Don’t fall in love on EA Sentence Correction

If you’ve watched some of our verbal videos, you’ve probably heard this before: whenever you do anything on the Verbal section, you should always look for four wrong answers, not one right answer. If you try to take shortcuts with this process, I promise that you’ll make mistakes, especially on relatively difficult questions.

The easiest mistake to make on Sentence Correction is this: you’ll read the original sentence, and decide what you want the sentence to say in its “correct” or “ideal” form. But I have bad news: whatever you’re thinking probably won’t be an option. Again, correct answers on Sentence Correction aren’t always good sentences; they’re sometimes just the least-awful of the five options.

So we’ll say it again: don’t fall in love on the Executive Assessment. Instead of looking for one wonderful, correct sentence, identify four wrong answers. You might not like the answer that remains, because it might sound like a steaming turd. (Whatever that sounds like.) But if you’ve done your job properly, it will still be the right answer on the EA.

Stick to Official Sentence Correction Questions

If you’re a fan of our content, you’ve probably heard this, too: GMAC spends between $1,500 and $3,000 developing every official question, and even the very best test-prep companies simply can’t compete with that.

So when you’re practicing, stick to the official stuff. You might be able to learn something from non-official Sentence Correction questions sometimes, but whenever possible, focus your energy on official questions.

Yes, EA Sentence Correction is About Reading Skill, Too.

If your reading skills are fundamentally weak, all of the Executive Assessment test-prep tutoring in the world won’t help your reading comprehension results.

The same is true for Sentence Correction, albeit to a lesser degree. If you struggle to understand EXACTLY how a small change in language impacts the meaning of a sentence, then even the greatest EA test-prep strategies won’t help much. Sure, you’ll be able to get mechanical, purely grammar-based questions right. And then you’ll hit a ceiling, since meaning is easily half of the battle.

So if your underlying reading skills need improvement, be honest with yourself about it! And if you need to work on your fundamental reading skills before you tackle the Executive Assessment, feel free to reach out to us, and we’ll introduce you to a great reading tutor who can help you become EA-ready. And if all you need is some nagging about EA sentence correction technique, we’ve got you covered.