Mastering SAT® Subject-Verb Agreement Questions (Part 1)

These strategies can also be applied to ACT® Subject-Verb Agreement.

Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA) Questions are among the most challenging items on the SAT® Reading and Writing Test, but with the right approach, they become highly predictable.

In Part 1 of this guide, you'll learn:

• How to quickly identify SVA Questions and distinguish them from Verb Tense Questions

• The core components of these questions, including True Subjects, Decoy Subjects, and Intervening Phrases

• A powerful step-by-step strategy that works for even the most complex questions

• Techniques for simplifying long, complicated sentences to reveal their basic structure

By the end of Part 1, you'll have a solid foundation in handling even the SAT's trickiest subject-verb agreement questions.

After mastering these fundamentals, you'll want to proceed to Part 2 of this guide, where I cover special cases involving the word "that" and other relative pronouns such as “who” and “which.” These situations require specific techniques beyond the basic strategies covered here in Part 1.

(Note - To fully understand what follows, you must first be familiar with the strategies for Verb Tense Questions. If you haven't learned those yet, you should do so before proceeding.)

Identifying Subject-Verb Agreement Questions

While Subject-Verb Agreement (SVA) Questions look similar to Verb Tense Questions, they are distinct question types and require different tactics. Below are the key identifying markers for SVA. I strongly recommend you memorize them to ensure you can move quickly on test day: