United States
Hong KongSubject-verb agreement on the FTCE
Agreement between subject and verb is skill 3 under Competency 3 of subtest 826, one of twelve conventions skills. The exam almost never asks about a simple sentence. It buries the subject behind a prepositional phrase, an inverted order, or a collective noun, then checks whether you found it.
You already know that a singular subject takes a singular verb. That is not what is being tested. What is being tested is whether you can find the subject when the sentence has been built to hide it.
Section 82 lists this as its own skill: "Determine and select agreement between subject and verb." It sits under Knowledge of standard English conventions, alongside eleven other skills, and that competency is the bulk of the subtest.
The five shapes that hide a subject
| Shape | What it looks like | Where the subject really is |
|---|---|---|
| Prepositional phrase between subject and verb | The box of pens is on the desk | box, not pens |
| Inverted order | On the shelf sit three folders | folders, after the verb |
| There is / there are | There are two reasons for this | reasons, after the verb |
| Collective noun | The committee meets on Fridays | committee, singular as a unit |
| Compound subject joined by or | Neither the students nor the teacher was ready | teacher, the nearer half |
Four of those five are solved by the same move. Cross out everything between the subject and the verb, then read what is left. "The box is." "The committee meets." The fifth needs a rule of its own.
The or rule, which is the one people get wrong
Subjects joined by and are plural. Subjects joined by or or nor agree with whichever half is nearer the verb. That is why "Neither the students nor the teacher was ready" is correct and "Neither the teacher nor the students were ready" is also correct. Same two nouns, different order, different verb.
Choose the option that corrects the underlined verb. The list of approved textbooks and reference materials __were__ posted last week.
- were posted (no change)
- was posted
- have been posted
- are posted
Indefinite pronouns
These carry their own agreement and the exam likes them because the answer is memorized rather than reasoned.
- Always singular: each, either, neither, everyone, everybody, someone, somebody, anyone, nobody, one
- Always plural: both, few, many, several
- Depends on the noun that follows: some, any, none, all, most
"Each of the teachers has a key." Singular, because each is the subject and of the teachers is a prepositional phrase. That sentence catches people every time.
What we would drill and what we would skip
Drill the prepositional-phrase case until it is automatic, because it is the most common one and the fix is mechanical. Learn the or rule as a sentence you can recite. Learn the always-singular indefinite list.
Skip the deep end. British-style collective plurals, agreement with fractions and percentages, and the the number of versus a number of pair come up in grammar textbooks more often than they can plausibly come up on 30 questions. On our estimate the whole conventions competency is about 19 questions across twelve skills, so agreement is likely one or two of them.
FLDOE publishes 30 questions for this subtest and no split beneath it. Any per-competency or per-skill figure on this site is our arithmetic, derived from the number of skills the rule states, and we label it every time.
The forty-minute problem
This subtest gives you 1.33 minutes a question on our division of the published figures, which is the tightest pace of the three multiple-choice subtests. An agreement question you have to reason through will cost you two minutes and you do not have them. Recognition is the goal, not analysis.
Common questions
Is subject-verb agreement on the FTCE General Knowledge Test?
Yes. Section 82 of the Twenty-Eighth Edition lists "Determine and select agreement between subject and verb" as a skill under Knowledge of standard English conventions on the English Language Skills subtest. Those competencies are incorporated into Rule 6A-4.0021 and are part of the rule.
How do I find the subject when a phrase gets in the way?
Cross out everything between the subject and the verb and read what is left. A prepositional phrase can never contain the subject, so "The box of pens is" survives the deletion and "the box of pens are" does not.
Do subjects joined by or take a singular or plural verb?
They agree with whichever half sits nearer the verb. "Neither the students nor the teacher was ready" is correct, and so is "Neither the teacher nor the students were ready". Subjects joined by and are always plural.
Are collective nouns singular on the FTCE?
Treat them as singular when the group acts as one unit, which is the American convention this test uses. "The committee meets on Fridays." Plural agreement with a collective noun is a British usage and is not what standard American conventions expect here.