Answer choice length for Sentence Correction questions

By Brent Hanneson - December 13, 2021

If you’ve eliminated 3 answer choices of a Sentence Correction (SC) question but can’t decide between the 2 remaining options, should you choose the one with fewer words? After all, the GMAT often reminds us of the importance of concision.

I was wondering the same thing, so I randomly selected 50 difficult (700+ level) official SC questions on GMAT Club and, for each question, I identified:

• the correct answer
• the incorrect answer most often selected (this info is available on GMAT Club)

The results:

• The option with fewer words was correct 28 times
• The option with more words was correct 13 times
• The two options had the same number of words 9 times

Note: By no means am I suggesting you replace your existing SC strategy with simply counting the number of words per answer choice, but if you're stuck between two options, the above statistics suggest you're better off choosing the shorter choice.