An average Joe's gateway to 700

I am thrilled to report that I scored 740 (Q48, V42). I am your average Joe (Jolie) and I believe that, if I can score 700+, then most people can.

At the beginning, the exam seemed to be very difficult. I scored a sore 530 on my first mock – Kaplan free test. The worst part was I scored a mere 23 on verbal. I used to think that with my convent education and a degree in economics, verbal would be my strength but the test told me otherwise. At this time, all I could hope for was to get close to 700. 740 seemed out of question.

Preparation - books and materials
I started off my preparation with the MGMAT books. I read the Number properties, Equations & Inequalities and word translations for quant and the SC, CR & RC books for Verbal. On Verbal, the SC book was quite good but I found the CR and RC books to be average. 2 months into my prep, I was already hitting 630s on the MGMAT exams.

At this time, I decided that I needed a prep course to boost my verbal. After considering Vertias, MGMAT and Kaplan, I decided on e-GMAT’s live course because of its focus on verbal. This course took my preparation to the next level. The SC concepts that I learned through MGMAT were crystal clear after going through this course. Two other things helped me a lot on SC. Firstly the fact that the course is very heavy on application. There are these application files that don’t teach you anything but to apply what you have learned. Secondly, they have this OG solutions video course that is awesome. The downside is that such solutions are only available for SC and not for CR.

The CR course when combined with live sessions is really good too. It helped me weave through the logic of arguments and provided me an approach for most CR questions types. My accuracy just shot up. I would definitely recommend this course if you need help on verbal. This course played a major role in improving my verbal from 30 to 42.