Subject verb agreement

[Eddie Gutia]

Consider the two sentences, The faculty meet/meets each Friday at noon. A majority of students feel/feels unsafe on school grounds.

Can you please explain whether the verbs meet and feel should be singular or plural and why?

[milindshastri]

Consider the two sentences, The faculty meet/meets each Friday at noon. A majority of students feel/feels unsafe on school grounds.

Can you please explain whether the verbs meet and feel should be singular or plural and why?

faculty=singular (see, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faculty) thus for sub-verb agreement the sentence should be ' the faculty(singular) meets(singular) each ...'.

In the second sentence, to simplify the sentence we can look at it without the prepositional phrase (method taught in "foundations of gmat verbal" manhattan 5th ed, page 65) the sentence without the prepositional phrase is 'A majority feel/feels unsafe'.
subject is majority=plural (see http://www.economist.com/style-guide/singular-or-plural), therefore use plural verb, i.e. feel. The second sentence would be 'A majority(plural) of students feel(plural) unsafe on school grounds'.

[RonPurewal]

Consider the two sentences, The faculty meet/meets each Friday at noon. A majority of students feel/feels unsafe on school grounds.

Can you please explain whether the verbs meet and feel should be singular or plural and why?

on GMAT problems you will not have to make these decisions in isolation; there will always be sufficient context to determine whether the noun in question should be plural or singular (unless the distinction is unnecessary in the first place).

the "context" could be grammatical (e.g., if something is referred to as "it", then it's singular -- see #98 in the OG verbal review), or it could just be the general meaning of the sentence. but you don't have to memorize any rules for this sort of thing.