GMAT Prep Online Guides and Tips

Wrong answer choices on Reading Comprehension GMAT questions are designed to include words, phrases, and ideas from the passage the question is tied to. This means that many wrong answer choices look right, since we can find “evidence” for them in the text. We can only successfully prove that the answer choice is wrong if we carefully read and understand the context of the related portion of the passage, which is both easy to mess up and tremendously time consuming when applied to every single wrong answer choice.

So how can we avoid getting confused by and wasting time on these wrong answer traps? In “#1 GMAT Reading Comprehension Trick: How to Avoid Trap Answers”, we explain one of the most valuable GMAT Reading Comprehension tips: making predictions.

Before even looking at the answer choices on Reading Comprehension questions, we should spend time attempting to answer the question in our own words based on information from the passage — in other words, we should make a prediction for what the correct answer will be. Only after we’re confident in our prediction should we look at our answer choices.

If we make a solid prediction, the correct answer choice will often be immediately apparent, as it will match our prediction perfectly. This allows us to bypass the wrong answers altogether, meaning there’s no way for us to get caught in their traps! In the case that the correct answer isn’t immediately obvious, we’ll still be able to quickly eliminate most (if not all) of the wrong answer traps for not matching our prediction, increasing our accuracy and saving us time.

Watch the video to see how this strategy is applied on a real Reading Comprehension GMAT question!

Used in conjunction with the GMAT Reading Comprehension tips from our GMAT Reading Comprehension Question Types video, making predictions can transform your performance on the Reading Comprehension section. Making predictions is also a valuable strategy on the Critical Reasoning section, where wrong answer choices are often closely related to the wrong part of the passage.

To stay updated on our latest GMAT videos, you can subscribe to our new PrepScholar GMAT YouTube channel — we’ll have three new free videos every month.

Happy GMAT Reading Comprehension studies!

I spend a lot of time on online GMAT forums, and one thing I see all the time is test takers ruling out their first few wrong answer choices based on something relatively unimportant like an ambiguous pronoun. Nobody ever told them that some GMAT Sentence Correction rules matter more than others! In fact, some GMAT Sentence Correction “rules”, are more like “suggestions” — some things that test takers consider “errors” are only wrong if there aren’t any worse errors in the other answer choices.

So how do we ensure that we’re eliminating the most egregious errors first and saving the less important errors for last? In “Grammar Order of Operations: Prioritizing GMAT Sentence Correction Rules”, we walk through which GMAT grammar rules are most important and how to ensure you’re not ruling out a correct answer for an unimportant reason.

When solving a complex math equation, we use the concept of order of operations to determine when to look at each part of the equation. We start by evaluating anything that’s in parentheses, then we apply exponents. Next, we multiply and divide, and finally we add and subtract. If we do these steps in the wrong order, we often end up with the wrong answer for our equation. 

Just like math has PEMDAS, there is an order of operations for GMAT grammar rules. We can use this grammar order of operations to eliminate answer choices in order from most important to least important. So when we evaluate answer choices using our GMAT Sentence Correction rules, we should look for errors in in the following order:

1. Meaning Errors
2. Hard Grammar Errors
3. Rhetoric Errors

This means that if we notice a rhetorical issue (like an ambiguous pronoun), we should wait to eliminate the answer until we are sure that there are no more meaning or hard grammar errors in any of the other answer choices.

In the video, we walk through the different kinds of errors in GMAT Sentence Correction rules that fall into each category, such as misplaced modifiers, parallelism, concision, etc. We also discuss how Idiom and Diction Errors can sometimes fall into either the Hard Grammar category of GMAT grammar rules or the Rhetoric category, and how test takers need to be especially careful with them — watch the video to find out why!

To stay updated on our latest GMAT videos, you can subscribe to our new PrepScholar GMAT YouTube channel — we’ll have three new free videos every month.

Happy GMAT Sentence Correction studies!