Sentence Correction on NTS GAT

A preview of critical reasoning Previewing sentence correction: This section is typically deemed to be the easiest of the three, but going into this section with overconfidence can cost you heavily. Here, you may have sentences with seven types of errors: verb time, comparison, modifiers, parallelism, subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement, and idioms.

Question Format and Structure

4 to 8 questions are typical in the sentence correction section of your NTS GAT test. You will have four/five choices for each question, and you will have to identify the correct one in terms of style, structure, grammar, usage, clarity, and idiomatic expression. The first option is usually the same as what is given to the question. A portion of the sentence is underlined, and you have to choose the best answer in terms of whether the underlined portion is correct or whether any of the remaining four choices can replace it to make the sentence clearer. Look at a sample question here in this site.

Commonly Tested Grammar on the NTS GAT

Consistency of pronoun use, subject-verb agreement, pronoun consistency, parallel construction, verb tense, dangling modifiers – these are the common grammatical aspects that you expect to be tested on in this section. Apart from this, you should keep an eye out for redundancy, word mismatches, and missing words.

Here Are a Few Ways that SC Questions Get Harder

• Sentences get longer and more complex
• The underlined portion gets longer (sometimes including the entire sentence)
• The correct answer is less appealing
• All the answers are grammatically correct, but only one is the best, making it difficult to find the right one
• The right answer may not be perfect, it may still be awkward. Don’t overlook an option just because it “doesn’t sound right”. The idea is to find the best among the given choices, not the best among all possible answers
• Word order errors or the use of similar sounding words that have different meanings is a common trick used to complicate GAT SC questions.

Top Seven Tips for Scoring in Sentence Correction

• Invest time in understanding basic concepts (e.g.: fluff vs. deep structure, clauses vs. phrases, verbs vs. verb forms) and get adequate practice.
• Look for subject-verb agreement issues which occur in almost half of your SC questions
• Line up pronouns correctly with their antecedents. Understand the rules
• There is typically one critical issue with each question. Your first step should be to eliminate all the answers that are evidently wrong in terms of this critical issue
• Use splits to eliminate wrong answers quickly but beware of false splits. Reading and comprehending the answer options thoroughly is a good way to avoid this trap
• Do not start by reading the paragraph and then the question and then going through each answer option one by one in detail. The key is to eliminate wrong answers as quickly as possible
• Every SC question is designed to evaluate two concepts, so starting out by identifying which two are being tested makes your answer choice elimination easier and the final choice more accurate