Parallelism
SAT glossary · Course Foundations
Definition
The requirement that items in a series or comparison share grammatical form. Tested in Form, Structure, and Sense items; the trap breaks the pattern in one element.
Parallelism in plain English
Parallelism is the rule that items appearing together in a list, or being directly compared to each other, all need to share the SAME grammatical form — for example, if a list starts with a verb ending in '-ing,' every other item in that list needs to also end in '-ing,' not switch to a different verb form partway through. This shows up across several different question types, and the trap is usually built by breaking the established pattern in just ONE single item hidden among several correctly-matching ones.
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