Beginner's Guide to Executive Assessment Sentence Correction
(A version of this article first appeared on GMAT Club, where we serve as the forum’s resident GMAT verbal experts. No, I have no idea why it took us two years to post a version on our own GMAT blog.)
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 4000 different idioms, 392 different EA grammar rules, and 10,000 kilograms of grammar jargon. Approximately.
All of that stuff is fine. You’ll definitely need a basic understanding of EA grammar, or else EA SC 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 EA SC grammar rules — and those won’t necessarily help you figure out what, exactly, you should do when an actual EA SC question pops up on the screen.
So here’s our attempt to cut through the noise with a simple, effective, “baseline” approach to EA SC, based on our decades of experience as EA and GMAT tutors. This EA 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). I watched a presentation by a high-ranking GMAT 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 GMAT psychometrician interrupted him politely: “Pardon me,” GMAT 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 GMAT 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 on EA verbal. And there is no “reading and grammar” section on the EA: it’s called “verbal reasoning.”
And unfortunately, to reach an elite level on EA 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 EA grammar in order to achieve elite results on EA sentence correction. But grammar alone won’t get you to a great EA score.
Setting priorities on GMAT sentence correction
The key to success on EA SC 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 EA grammar you can find. But here’s how it can hurt you on the EA: when you see an actual EA 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 EA SC rules and jargon and idioms?
So if you’ve already maximized your EA grammar knowledge – without actually maximizing your EA sentence correction results – then you probably need to simplify your approach, and focus on the most important things first. To succeed on EA SC, you’ll want to begin by executing flawlessly on two steps.
Step 1: find DEFINITE EA SC 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 EA SC 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 EA test-takers will begin by eliminating SC 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 a “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 Executive Assessment SC 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 EA grammar rules – or because the EA simply loves to test them:
pronouns (it, they, that, those, etc.)
modifiers (that, which, “-ing”, “-ed”, etc.)
parallelism, including special parallelism triggers (both/and, either/or, not/but)
basic comparisons, especially phrases that use “like,” “unlike”, or “as”
subject-verb agreement
verb tenses, but especially past perfect tense
a few other minor-but-straightforward topics: semicolons, “due to”, and countable vs. non-countable modifiers
As a first step to success on EA SC, 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 an EA 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 EA 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 EA sentence correction. To be fair, that’s just a very rough estimate: some official EA questions, like this one and this one, are based solely on those seven topics. But in other EA SC questions – including this one and this one – those seven topics are lamentably useless.
So these seven topics aren’t everything on EA sentence correction. But they’re always the most efficient place to start.
Step 2: compare remaining EA SC 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 Executive Assessment 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 EA 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 EA SC sentences is a difficult thing, since no two EA questions will test exactly the same content and meaning. But unfortunately, there’s no way around it: to achieve an elite EA SC score, you’ll have to get pretty good at finding the strict, LITERAL differences in meaning between two or more answer choices.
Your ear is your enemy on EA sentence correction!
Now that we’ve discussed what you should do when you’re getting started on Executive Assessment sentence correction, let’s talk about what you shouldn’t do.
For starters, you should NEVER rely on your ear on EA sentence correction, unless you have absolutely no other options. When GMAT SC was first developed in the 1980s, globalization hadn’t really taken off yet, and the GMAT’s creators certainly weren’t trying to torment non-native speakers. The whole point was just to see whether GMAT test-takers could tell the difference between “correct written English” and the way educated Americans speak in real life.
In other words, GMAT sentence correction was designed to punish test-takers who relied on their ear on the GMAT verbal section. And that hasn’t changed at all.
Let’s face it: a huge percentage of correct Executive Assessment SC 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 (not very useful) GMAT official guide explanations 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 EA-style 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 “EA verbal reasoning", not "ooh, this one sounds pretty good."
What about other Executive Assessment SC grammar rules?
By now, you might be thinking: “Hang on, Ninja EA tutor people. I’ve studied tons of other things about EA SC, 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 EA sentence correction – or if your EA SC 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:
Your ability to immediately recognize the most straightforward, frequently-tested rules as soon as you see any EA SC question. If an SC answer choice features a basic grammar topic, like parallelism or pronouns or modifier placement, then you absolutely can’t afford to miss it.
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” EA grammar rules and if you’re able to use them wisely, that’s great: keep going! Just don’t let your quest for more EA grammar knowledge distract you from the important stuff that really drives your success on EA 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 Executive Assessment 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 EA verbal questions.
The easiest mistake to make on EA 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 EA 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 on EA SC, 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 EA sentence correction questions
If you’re a fan of our verbal videos or our GMAT Club verbal forum posts, you’ve probably heard this, too: GMAC spends between $1500 and $3000 developing every official Executive Assessment question, and even the very best test-prep companies simply can’t compete with that.
So when you’re doing practice EA questions, stick to the official stuff. You might be able to learn something from non-official EA sentence correction questions sometimes, but whenever possible, focus your SC energy on official EA questions.
Yes, EA sentence correction is about reading skill, too
If you’ve watched our verbal videos or worked with any of our EA tutors, you’ve probably heard this already: if your reading skills are fundamentally weak, all of the Executive Assessment test-prep tutoring in the world won’t help your EA CR and RC results.
The same is true for SC, 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 EA questions right. And then you’ll hit a ceiling on SC, 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.