A humbling experience - Follow their approach!

I should start off this review by mentioning that my GMAT experience (test day) was not the best. This is something I will save for my debrief, but in a few words, my verbal score was much lower than in my practice exams.

When I started studying for the GMAT I was scoring in the 27-28 range for verbal. While I have lived in the US for a few years, I am a nonnative English speaker, so I knew I needed a program that would help me improve my verbal score. That is what made me choose e-Gmat. I got the Verbal Live Prep package since they were offering a special discount that made it more attractive moneywise.

The program explains very well all the verbal components of the test and provides you with tons of practice problems in which to apply what you have learned. I particularly liked the sentence correction section. In fact, SC went from being my worst section to being my greatest strength, and I attribute this improvement to eGmat.

The videos also make the course a lot more interactive and engaging. I had MGMAT SC book, which is great, but a bit too technical for me and a bit tough to read if you’re not in the right mood to study. I also enjoyed and learned a lot from watching the live webinars.

Regarding the cons, there are two things that I would like to mention. First, it seems like there are differences between American and Indian English, and this is something that constantly distracted me while watching or working on various problems. The most notable difference is the fact that, many times, it seems like sentences lack words such as “a”, “an”, and “the.” While this might be just a minor thing to some people, it really bothered me at one point.

The second thing is that, at least during my preparation, many of the videos needed to be updated to correct general errors. Some of these errors are pointed out in the eGmat forums. An example is the formatting of some of the SC problems. Some of these problems only have certain parts of the sentence underlined, but still, some of the answers will change the entire sentence, regardless of whether the part that they are changing was underlined or not. Likewise, you will also find the opposite cases: a whole the sentence might be underlined, but the answer choices will consist of only a few words. In that sense, I believe that this does not make the e-Gmat experience very GMAT-like.

Nevertheless, I very much liked the course and I recommend it everybody, but particularly to non-English speakers. In about a month my verbal score was improving and eventually I started scoring consistently in the 34-35 range. Unfortunately, I got really nervous on the night before the test and couldn’t sleep well. On top of that, I was also very nervous during the test, and I believe all these factors contributed to me getting a low verbal score (31).

There’s also a very important point that I’d like to make. There was a point were I believed I didn’t need to follow the eGmat approach. I did not want to spend time learning and applying this approach because, in my mind, it was just a waste of time and I thought that, somehow, it would all make sense during the exam and the questions would be easier. BIG MISTAKE. I believe this arrogance is what got me stuck in the 34-35 range. Taking the GMAT was actually a very humbling experience, and I will renew my subscription to eGmat soon so that I can take the GMAT again. This time, however, I will follow their approach. I highly recommend that you also do this, otherwise, you will waste a lot of your time (like me), and not get very good results.