How wrong answers are built
A reference to the wrong answers on the SAT, ACT and AP exams: what each pattern is, how to spot it, and how often it appears in a bank of real practice questions.
Wrong answers on these exams are not random. Each one is the right answer broken in a specific, repeatable way, and there are only so many ways to break it. Once a pattern has a name, you can catch yourself reaching for it. The most common ones are first.
If you would rather start with the diagnosis than the vocabulary, why you keep picking the wrong answer on SAT Reading walks through the six that account for most of them.
- Solved the wrong thing
Your work is right and the number you land on is real, but it answers a different question than the one asked: an earlier step, a related quantity, or simply the wrong variable.
- Overstates the evidence
The data point in the right direction and the choice treats them as settling more than they do, or as settling nothing when they clearly point one way. The verdict is wrong, not the reading.
- Says the opposite
The choice is built from the passage's own words and its own topic, but one word reverses the meaning, so it denies what the text affirms or affirms what the text denies.
- Right topic, wrong part
The choice is about the passage's subject but the wrong piece of it: the wrong group, the wrong stage, the wrong paragraph, or something the passage mentions without ever addressing.
- Read the wrong row
The arithmetic is right and the answer is wrong, because the number came out of the wrong row, column, series or trial. It is a reading error wearing the costume of a maths error.
- Claim goes too far
The passage says something carefully and the choice says the same thing far more strongly, turning a maybe into an always, until the text no longer supports it.
- Sounds right, never said
A wrong answer that fits the topic and matches what you already believe, but states something the passage never actually says, so the text gives you no line you can point to.
- Reversed relationship
Both halves of the choice really are in the passage, but the link between them runs backwards: the effect becomes the cause, or the later event is placed first.
- True but not asked
The choice is accurate and you can back it up from the passage, but it answers a different question than the one in front of you, so being true is not enough to make it right.
- Right word, wrong sense
The choice gives a real meaning of the tested word, one you could defend from a dictionary, and it is not the meaning the sentence is using. Vocabulary knowledge is what makes it tempting.
More patterns are being added, most common first.
Find out which of these catches you. Work through real questions and see, after each one, which pattern the answer you picked was built on.
Try a real question