Grateful

I decided to apply for a Top10 B-School long time ago. I was totally aware that to have at least some chance to be admitted I needed to reach a really great score in the GMAT, a quite difficult exam, as long as I had heard by then. So I decided to buy some study material, from some of the most prestigious publishers in the world. I will not name them here, but they are some of the people who have produced really enriching material in the past.

By that time I was working in the US, a dream I had pursued for the previous two years and hence I wanted to demonstrate my supervisors my commitment with my job and with my company. Therefore, I had no much time left and it was clear that this GMAT thing would take me a while and I would not get my super score overnight. However, I was not aware of how difficult this thing would really be…

I am an engineer, so I supposed that Quantitative wouldn´t be a big deal. So although I studied for it I focused on Verbal. I am a non-native, but I think I have been average good at English all my life, so I felt confident that I would improve quite a lot and would get a high score. So after studying for some months I scheduled my exam within several weeks and, went for it. For whatever reason, I did not do any practice exam in advance (don´t ask me why, probably in my arrogant way of thinking I felt I didn´t need it). I did the exam, feeling fine about it, but I was amazed when the screen said I had just got 570. I was really expecting way higher score than that one, something close to the 700s. That day I realized that GMAT was something to take into account, not just a mere exam like those of college. This is hard stuff.

So I revisited the study material I had, the one from the recognized publisher (I am not using “recognized” ironically, they have really good stuff out there), and did tons of exercises, with not more guide that the one in the books I was using. I studied hard for a year, using each loose hour I had to study (I was travelling a lot for work by that time, I did many of those exercises in planes and hotel rooms), confident that if I put hours and hours on it I would improve my score considerably. That strategy had worked out pretty well all my life, why wouldn´t work with this regards? I was absolutely wrong… I took the exam several more times, but I did not get to the 700s not even close.

I was really upset: I had studied a good amount of hours, gone through my books and repeated the strategies learnt on them. What was going on? No matter how hard I was working on this and how much of my time I was diverting to this, I wasn´t able to surpass a line. I wasn´t being inefficient in my study, I was having hours of study of good quality, but that wasn´t counting. It was like having and upper barrier above me that I was not capable to break. So one Sunday, searching in internet I found GMATClub. I didn´t get into it too much that day (mistake, GMATClub is just amazing, I would like to post another review of them here), but there I was recommended to attend a free webinar by a company I didn´t know about. It was scheduled an hour later and I had nothing better to do that Sunday, so I joined. There was a gent giving a brief explanation about how is GMAT exam organized first, and then describing a feeling that he assured many people experienced when preparing the exam. He was saying that for many people, no matter how hard they study, they were stopped up to a certain level and a certain score. Beyond that level, they weren’t able to pass. By that time, my concentration on the webinar was 1000%, that gent was describing basically what was happening to me! He was saying that there were several reasons for not being able to surpass such barrier, but the most important were not having developed your core skills properly, and probably the way you were absorbing knowledge (in my case, my books from the traditional publishers). He defined that situation of being stuck at one level as “Score Plateau”, which is a very appropriate term, in my opinion. That gent was Rajat Sadana, co-founder of e-GMAT, and he was presenting his e-GMAT Verbal Live Prep course.

I decided to take that course right away and soon I started to realize how misled my study strategy had been. The Verbal Live Prep course changes from top to bottom the way you approach the Verbal section of the GMAT Exam. Rajat, Payal, Krishna and the rest of experts of e-GMAT (whom I am very grateful to) change the way you envision this in both form and content.

Content: because they re-define many of the core concepts that you need to understand previously to master the GMAT: the difference between accuracy and ability, the real definition of an Assumption or how you can truly read a passage with effective Reading Comprehension, for instance; because they provide you with powerful tools to face a question: the Pre-Thinking approach, the Negation Test, the iSWAT choices, the difference between polar opposite and logical opposite, the Variance Analysis, and so many other concepts that help you understand deeply what you are asked; because they have such a good question bank, way better that any other I might have tried, to help you understand the lessons first and master the sections afterwards; because they give you access to practice exams from 800Score and GMATClub, the stepping stones on your way to master the exam, in my opinion.

Form: because they use an online course that is a format significantly more effective than traditional books. Organized intelligently, this course gives you access to related problems, right after a concept is learnt. It is pretty easy to navigate and easier to carry (I do not need to bring my heavy books with me when flying in my work trips). The course does not allow you to keep going if detects that you have not internalized the concepts taught. This gives you the security of not being leaving important stuff behind unwittingly. Besides, each lesson is reinforced with Live Sessions on the weekends, where you not only go over what you have studied, but you also learn some strategic tips to increase your performance when practicing, and can ask all the questions that you have come up with during the week.

I have scheduled my GMAT exams within three weeks from now. My score in my last practice exam, four days ago, was 750. I do not know how well I will perform, but these guys have indeed given me something I lacked before: an enormous confidence on myself and on my knowledge. I will tell you in twenty days…

Good luck to you all.