It always seems impossible until its done!

I started my GMAT prep back in August 2021 and self-prepared with OGs and a few other books and ended up with a score of 640 (V-29, Q-47). While doing the prep, i came across several success story videos of E-gmat and was quite intrigued with the process discussed such as meaning based approach for SC and Pre-thinking for CR. I did go through a couple of webinars of E-gmat for SC and CR and tried to imbibe the process into my prep, but clearly, I had too little time on hand to do justice with it. After the 1st attempt, I was sure that I was going to buy the E-gmat course because the process made logical sense to me, and I needed a structured approach. I took a break from my prep and purchased the E-gmat course in February 2022. The plan was to prepare for 4 months and give the test in June 2022. But due to work commitments, I could not really prepare regularly till mid-May. Coming to the course, to start with, it asks you about your current scores and your target scores and accordingly suggests a plan forward. The most important course to start with is their Master Comprehension course. It literally helps you to master the comprehension. It teaches you the basic structure of a sentence, the pause points, how to break a sentence and how to assimilate the meaning. Post this, I started with my verbal course doing SC, CR, RC in that sequence. Each course comprised of concept files, concept quizzes, practice quizzes and the most important, the application files. The application files teach you, in a guided manner, how to solve a question in a structured way. Post completing all these files for each section, the course suggests you to cement the concepts by taking few cementing quizzes. The cementing quizzes are handpicked questions by the E-gmat experts of medium and hard difficulty. I did the cementing for all the sections (i.e., scoring 70% or above in medium difficulty, and 55% or above in hard). Though it was not easy at first, but post reviewing each of the question I attempted and taking the corrective actions such as going back to the specific concept/application files where I feel there is a gap, I was able to build up an ability to solve questions. Post this, I went on and did OG questions for practice. In between, I attempted my first 2 sigma X mocks (E-gmat mocks) and scored 650 (V35, Q44) and 690 (V40, Q44). I realised that I have built a base ability in verbal and just need to refine some areas to maintain the ability. Post scoring a 690, I was included in the Last Mile Program, a program where a mentor helps you out to get test ready.
My mentor, Abha Mohan, connected with me and helped me out with a plan to refine my rough patches. By looking at my account statistics she figured out that I was struggling with concepts such as modifiers and subject verbs in SC, Evaluate and Strengthen in CR. Hence, I went back to the course, revised few concepts, and reattempted the practice files. Post this, there was a confidence within me in my ability to solve questions within a limited time. Next, she shared a plan with me for my test readiness where I had to give few combined quizzes of 25 questions and 33 questions. I scored a decent 76% on both the quizzes for verbal and around 60%-70% in quants. I gave my last official mock before the test and scored 710 with a V37 and Q49. Finally, went ahead with exam and ended up scoring a 700 (V35, Q49). The test day was not a great experience because of lack of sleep and some bad decisions during the test. As I was struggling with time in Verbal section during the end, I made the most terrible mistake to not finish my Verbal section and ended up getting a 3-point penalty, which was evident in my ESR where my average Verbal score was a 38. It was my bad decision which may have cost me about 10-20 points in my overall score.
To conclude, few important things that the course emphasis on are: 1. Just because you have completed the course, that doesn’t mean you will not have to go back again and again to the specific concepts. Revising the concepts is going to refine what you have already built. 2. One should strategically review each question that he/she has solved and in that review each of the options are to be reviewed. One should have absolute clarity as to what was correct in the correct choice, and what was incorrect in the other four. Unless you do this process with diligence on all the questions that you solve, the improvement will not be visible. 3. Maintaining an error log is as important, if not more, as solving questions. If you do not maintain it, it will be difficult to understand and accept where exactly you lack or what mistakes do you make. 4. The solutions to each of the questions, be it verbal or quants, are detailed and follow the structure which has been taught in the concepts. If there are still any doubts left post reviewing the solution, there are forums below each question where there are several questions asked by previous students and these have been responded to by the E-gmat experts. These forums helped me significantly in getting clarity over every aspect of the question. The final thing to note is that just buying the course alone will not guarantee success. One must imbibe the process and be diligent to really make use of this excellent course. Have patience and trust the process.