Low or negative ROI in improving Verbal score

REVIEWER IDENTITY VERIFIED by score report [?]

Improvement N/A

Course e-GMAT Online 360

Instructor Shraddha Jaiswal

Location Online

I signed up e-GMAT Verbal Live Prep in June 2013. The main reason that I chose it was because of very positive reviews. "Best course for non-native speakers", "Huge improvement in verbal scores" etc. These advertisements and reviews really attracted my attention. I'm a non-native English speaker and I want to improve my verbal score. So I decided to buy the course. Having tried the course, taken the GMAT and later tried another source (MGMAT Verbal Prep Set), I feel I have to offer another side of story amid so many positive reviews here. Let's talk about the Pros and Cons:

Pros:
1. Provides a very well structured study plan with concepts and quizzes for each section. (This may be useful for anyone who lacks discipline)
2. Comes with free mock exams that can generate performance analytical reports. (However, the timer doesn't work well, leading to wrong timings of your response time)
3. The e-GMAT time was kind enough to extend my course when I couldn't finish it in time. (The login was valid for about 6 months and they extended it for 2 months)

Cons:
1. Repetition in both contents and methods. I completed the whole course and took notes diligently. At the end I found some similar notes appeared multiple times--some contents were repeated here and there. The few e-GMAT methods used to solve Verbal questions were heavily repeated.

2. Methods don't work. In theory they sound good. But after studying the course for 8 months, I found these methods very time consuming and mentally draining in practice. They just don't work well in mock/real GMAT exams.

3. The course is very inflexible. This inflexibility, coupled with the fact that the course is extremely content heavy, makes it very time consuming to finish the whole course. It took me 8 months to finish (I work full time). I can't control my pace. Some contents are easy for me and repeated too much. The repetition plus sheer volume of contents buries the important areas which I may be weak at. It feels as if you read a whole library of books within 8 months. At the end, your mind goes blank. Maybe you remember a little here and there but nothing stands out. ROI is just so low: you spent so much time reaping so little improvement in your verbal skills.

4. The online lectures are a COMPLETE waste of time (and money). This was very obvious. In a 2 hour lecture, the instructors would spend the first ~30 minutes advertising their course. Because there are many attendees, the instructor can sometimes spend half an hour just to explain one question and answer all the questions. I may have just one doubt on a question and managed to get a few minutes of the instructor's time to answer it. Often, I'm still confused after he/she answers it. Then the rest of the time was wasted on listening to him/her explaining things that I have already known. After 1 or 2 lectures, I decided to just watch the recording and found myself frequently fast-forward the videos. In a 2 hour lecture, maybe only 15 minutes was useful.

In mock exams, I could score between 690 and 730. After 6 months of running the e-GMAT marathon, my course was going to expire. e-GMAT team was kind enough to extend it by another 2 moths. I finally made my first attempt at GMAT and only scored 700 (Q50, V33, AWA 5.5, IR 8). It was a huge disappointment. e-GMAT team's kindness to extend my course may have only backfired: I felt I wasted another 2 months on a course with near zero ROI. I spent so much time (8 months) on e-GMAT yet I didn't feel my verbal improved at all.

After that I decided to try MGMAT Verbal Prep set. I had very good discipline and took just 1.5 months to finish the whole set. Took GMAT again and scored 760 (Q51, V41, AWA 6.0, IR 8). I was even surprised by myself that I could improve so much with MGMAT. I also have to credit MGMAT for its Quant. My quant was pretty solid and I didn't spend too much time on it. However, the "Advanced GMAT Quant" by MGMAT was really good on methods & tricks for the more difficult quant questions. That did help keep my quant score high.

So in summary I feel e-GMAT is a course that costs an enormous amount of time to complete and only gives you negative to marginal positive improvements on your verbal score.

May 01, 2015

3274K

Thanks! Im a non-native speaker, have given GMAT twice, stuck in the 700-710 range (Q49, V34-38). I want to cross the 740+ barrier? I've already covered the MGMAT SC, CR and RC books. I was thinking of e-gmat now but am wary looking at your review. Any suggestions on what would work best to improve my verbal?

July 23, 2016

mmorshed

You are absolutely RIGHT!!! I'm also a VICTIM of E-Gmat marketing!!! After completion of the course I found this is mostly Unnecessarily heavy and full of sounds which really DOESN'T COUNT to do well in real GMAT.
E-Gmat tries to present their methods as MANTRA!! But truly speaking this Mantra Works well ONLY FOR SELECTIVE questions they present in that scope but in reality those methods don't work much.

The Free video lessons are quite nicely presented and guys get fooled of having gone through those free goodies!! It is far far far better to go through directly to OG questions other than wasting time on the online courses they offer. This can be surely said that if anyone spends his/her time on OG explanations/directly on OG questions other than spending lot of works on E-Gmat's courses he/she will be benefited both by saving time and by doing well in actual GMAT.

Other than focusing on core message E-GMAT focuses on their spectacular presentations and this is my gut feeling having gone through their courses.

August 03, 2016

egmat

There are a few posters who, over the course of 2+ years have expressed their dissatisfaction with the course. This is in stark contrast with the other 1000+ positive reviews on the forum. While I understand that these two posters (@anonymous and mmorshed) here were not able to score high enough, there is overwhelming data that proves the effectiveness of our courses. Please read below for the same:

==1100+ reviews and accounted for more than 50% of all reviews in last 6 months==

e-GMAT is the only prep company that has 1000+ reviews on GMAT Club. To ensure that the reviews are genuine and are provided by students who benefit from the course, GMAT Club changed its review policy in October 2015 and required that every review be verified by providing a verified score report or a variety of other means. Since then, e-GMAT students have accounted for more than 50% of all the reviews posted.

Just to reiterate, there have been more reviews and success stories posted for e-GMAT than for all the other GMAT Prep partners combined. Moreover, this change in review process had the least impact on the frequency of reviews posted for e-GMAT. Open the link below to see the stats.

Link: https://goo.gl/UG2RSV

==The best instructors (4 out of Top 5)==

At e-GMAT we are known for the consistency of our methods. We developed the 3-step meaning based approach in Sentence Correction, and devised a methodical approach for Critical Reasoning (Prethinking) and Reading Comprehension (Reading Strategies). We solve each and every question using these methods so it’s natural that you would see these methods repeated everywhere. Ninety-Nine percent of people love that the same method can be applied to solve every GMAT Question. This consistency/repetition is the reason why 4 out of top 5 rated instructors on GMAT Club are from e-GMAT. You can see more data in the links below:

http://gmatclub.com/reviews/highest-rated-gmat-instructors

https://e-gmat.com/about-faculty/

It seems that the original poster did not like this consistency. Also, I am surprised that the original poster (who posted anonymously) mentioned that we do marketing in our online sessions. There is zero marketing in the paid webinars, which constitute the majority of live sessions and are exclusive to Live Prep students. There is no point marketing in the paid webinars since everyone who attends the same is already a paid member. Only free webinars contain some marketing, which is limited to 12 minutes out of the 120-minute duration. I am actually surprised that the original poster, having claimed to have viewed the recordings, failed to note this distinction. One other thing that the original poster did not mention is that every online lecture is rated by students and that we constantly seek feedback to improve. We would not do the same had we not been serious about student’s success.

==The course can have a significant impact in as few as 25 days==

Take a look at these success stories below:

http://gmatclub.com/forum/450-670-in-3-months-impact-of-last-3-weeks-219803.html

http://gmatclub.com/forum/debrief-550-to-710-2-years-6-times-163623.html

http://gmatclub.com/forum/keep-the-fire-alive-trek-to-760-from-610-first-mock-208020.html

The above success stories are three of the many examples in which students have completed the course in 3 months or less. Now, can you take 8 months to complete the course? Yes, if you don’t take the time out to study.

In fact, we conduct a webinar called GMAT Score Booster Webinar in which we teach how to leverage data analytics and improve from a V28 to a V37 in 25 days.

==Course architecture renders immense flexibility==

The beauty of our course architecture is that you can study at your own pace and create your own curriculum based on your current ability. A majority of our concepts contain pre-assessment quizzes that allow you to evaluate whether you need to go through the concept or not. If you are able to complete the pre-assessment quiz with high accuracy, then we recommend that you skip the concept. Do books provide this granularity and flexibility – No. Do we force you to use this flexibility – No. Do students who use it, benefit – Absolutely!!

Bottom line – the platform is flexible enough to allow you to focus on areas that will result in score improvement.

==Understand that success on the test depends on factors other than the prep course that you take==

This is a very important point. Neither your success nor your failure is entirely attributable to the prep course you opt for. There are other factors, such as your overall preparation level, how you perform on the test day itself, etc. Just yesterday, I worked with one of our students who did not score as high on his test (scored 700) because he messed up the first two questions (in SC) on the actual exam. How did we figure this out - by reviewing his Enhanced Score Report. Now this student scored 750 in his GMAT Prep mocks and has a high ability score in Scholaranium – our quizzing platform. Should he be blaming us or for that matter GMAC and blame the mock tests as faulty? Something to think about.

Similarly, the two posters (@anonymous and mmorshed) completed the course. I am also quite certain that they would have done quite well on mocks. If so, then they should also consider other factors that could have led to your low score. @ mmorshed - assuming I am not mistaken, your course access expired 2+ months back. Also, I don’t have a record of you writing to us after Oct 2015. How were your scores on GMAT Prep?

@mmorshed - I want to ask you – before solely blaming the methods, did you look for other reasons that could have led to a bad score? Also, did you write to us with your Enhanced Score Report to do a diagnosis of your performance on the exam? Prior to the test, were your ability scores on Scholaranium in line with the score that you expected on the real GMAT?

Success, especially on a computer adaptive test such as GMAT, depends on a multitude of factors, and as such no course can guarantee success for every student. Having said that, with 1000+ reviews, and more success stories than there are for any other prep company there is good data to prove that our methods work really well and that e-GMAT has helped more GMAT Club members than any other course has.

February 15, 2017

meemii45

cannot agree more!! with poster and mmorshed.

Super basic and it doesn't help for your Gmat score.

There are a lot of good review which everyone should be aware of,

otherwise

You

will

be

#We are a victim of egmat marketing#