Approximately 14 of the 41 Verbal section questions will be sentence completion questions. The Sentence Correction questions present an English sentence written in an awkward or ineffective style. A portion of the sentence is underlined. Five choices present different versions of the underlined sentence portion. The first choice is always identical to the underlined portion of the sentence, while the other four are variations of phrasing and vocabulary. The examinee must select the best of these five choices to replace the underlined portion. This section of the exam is multiple choice.
The Sentence Correction questions test correct expression. In other words, this section tests the ability to recognize good grammar. A sentence should adhere to the grammatical principles of English, including sentence-noun agreement, verb tense, pronoun case and consistency. The examinee should further be able to make corrections to dangling modifiers, inconsistent expression and faults of parallel correction.
The sentence correction questions test effective expression. In other words, the examinee should be able to identify the most concise and clear way to make a statement. There are no superfluous words or complicated expressions. The sentence uses appropriate words for the level of the text and proper diction.
The Verbal Section of the GMAT consists of 41 multiple choice questions in the areas of sentence correction, critical reasoning and reading comprehension. The examinee has 75 minutes to complete the section. The score on the section ranges from 0 to 60.
There are many ways to prepare for the GMAT. Students should be familiar with basic English grammar. Courses offered by Princeton Review and Kaplan can help students focus on specific weaknesses as well as provide general test-taking strategies. Books and computer programs of the GMAT are widely available. Taking sample tests will help improve scores. Familiarity with the type of erroneous sentences shown on the GMAT will help the examinee identify problematic sentences right away. In particular, pronoun errors, misplaced modifiers, comparison errors, quantity errors, idiom errors, subject-verb agreement errors and tense errors are the most common.
On a multiple choice exam, it is advantageous to guess if one of the answer choices can be eliminated. Read the complete sentence, look for specific errors in the sentence, then eliminate answer choices with grammatical problems. Select the answer choice that preserves the meaning of the sentence, but contains no grammatical errors.