RCs can make or break your Verbal Score!! [V34- V41] => 710 to 750

I had given my GMAT more than a year ago (710- V34, Q50) and at that point of time I used to absolutely dread RCs. I found them really mundane and could never get myself to focus. While my quant was always strong, and CR and SC were average, RCs just didn't come to me naturally. And no, this does not mean that I'm weak at English in general. Infact, I'm among the most annoying grammar nazis that you may across. But each time I would come across an RC in the middle of my mocks, I would feel low and lose time and thereby end up rushing through my SC and CR questions as well.

Then, my friend introduced me to e-GMAT and I cannot thank him enough for having done that. After a year long break, I felt the need to go over SC and CR concepts as well and the videos provided by e-GMAT made them a whole lot of fun. I would stay up till late night, watching the videos, almost like I'd be watching a sitcom. They were light and helped me brush up my concepts very well. I had read someone's review about making handwritten notes while watching videos and then transferring those onto Evernote at the end of each day as that would not only help you revise, but also create a handy notebook for you to skim through while you're on the move. This tip helped me a lot and I would really recommend it to you all as well. I made my notes nice and colourful and added screenshots and links to them. Going over them later seemed fun because of all the colours I had added. (let me know if you want me to share them with you!)

The RC videos were really helpful as well. e-GMAT provides you a number of key strategies that you must keep in mind while reading through RCs. The one strategy that worked wonders for me was "to get immersed". I would literally tell myself at the beginning of each passage that "Oh! this sounds interesting, lets read what happens next!" I even used the note making approach during RCs quite regularly and was thereby able to get ALL my main point and structure questions right. These strategies seem very time consuming in the beginning, but within no time, you start to internalise them.

The other thing that I absolutely loved about the VLP was the scholaranium. Since I knew that RC was my weak point, I had decided to do atleast 4 passages every day, along with 20 SCs and 20 CRs. I used to create a lot of RC Ability quizzes and while I started with a 43% accuracy (with no time left to answer the last one), by the end I had 96% accuracy which was a great achievement for me. Infact, the day before my GMAT, when I sat down to give my RC ability test, I felt I was able to breeze through it easily. I wasn't spending to much time reading and even the answers were coming to me naturally.
When I submitted the test, I saw my score report in which I had just one (Hard) question wrong out of a total of 4 RC passages. This was my biggest confidence booster and I was sure that my GMAT would go well this time, which it did!

Infact, I finished by Quant section 18 minutes in advance and my Verbal section 15 minutes in advance and landed up with a V41, Q50 and a total of 750. I was literally shivering while answering my last few Verbal questions because the difficulty level had gone up which also meant my score was going up.

I wouldn't say that a V41 is a kickass score, but for someone like me who dreaded RCs to such a large extent, it was definitely an accomplishment, specially since I was now able to answer the questions so much faster.

Thank you e-GMAT once again and thanks to all those who read my review till the very end. I hope I was able to motivate a few of you out there like me, who may have totally given up on RC.

All the best to you all !!