Rather than v. Than

[ghong14]

I wanted to get some guidance of the use of rather than v. than in sentence correction problems. When is the usage of than appropriate v. the usage of rather than. This is something that has come up alot in sentence correction comparisons. If I remember correctly, the sacagewa coin problem was one of them. Thank you instructor.

[RonPurewal]

I wanted to get some guidance of the use of rather than v. than in sentence correction problems. When is the usage of than appropriate v. the usage of rather than. This is something that has come up alot in sentence correction comparisons. If I remember correctly, the sacagewa coin problem was one of them. Thank you instructor.

"rather than" is not at all like "than", so i'm not sure exactly how one could be faced with a choice between them.
(in short, "rather than" is a construction all by itself; "than" is only the second half of a construction, and must be paired with "more", "less", etc.)

you say that this "has come up a lot" in SC problems, so you almost certainly must have some examples in mind.
please post a specific problem (or more than one, if you have more than one) in which this is actually an issue; that will help us see what you're asking about here. thanks.