E-gmat course review

Dear GMAT Club Members

Background:

I took my GMAT exam a few months ago and scored a 600 (Q49, V26).

You do not have to be a rocket scientist to guess that I am a non-native English speaker. However, I never thought this would happen with me because –firstly, I am a voracious reader (English), secondly, I have been working in an English speaking country for past 3.5 years and finally my IELTS score, which I took a month before taking GMAT, was 8.5 with a perfect score 9 in speaking, listening and reading.

I spent hundreds of hours to improve my SC but to no avail. I could not understand why.

About a month after the exam, I started looking for an online course which would emphasis on verbal section particularly SC. There are lot of prep companies out there and many of them are really good, however one needs to choose based on what may work for them. Sometimes the sheer volume of prep companies makes this choice very hard for us.

E-gmat course: As you may be aware that it is an online e-learning tool which focuses on verbal section of GMAT (Quant is new so don’t know much about it). The company claims to have receive the highest positive reviews by customers on GMAT club. Given the quality of their course, I do not have any doubts about their claim.

I have listed the good and bad parts of the course which may help you make a decision.

What works:
- Content – E-gmat verbal has an awesome online content. They have nailed it. They have covered even small topics in great depth. Each topic has an online pre and post assessment quizzes, which helps you quickly see improvements in your understanding.

- Explanation – The content delivery is structured, consistent and most importantly is very effective. I loved their three step approach in SC. I was bit sceptical about their approach initially but when started applying it, I could see the results. My mock test verbal results have improved significantly and I now easily score above 36 ( highest 42, average 38).

- Blogs – I believe they are single biggest source of online article on tricky verbal concepts except GMAT club.

- Support - Their support team is also very great. Why, because it responds quickly (generally in a day’s time) with detailed solution to your question or problem. I have asked personal queries about strategy etc to Rajat and he got back to me in a day’s time with a detailed advice.

- Cost - $199, which I think is reasonable and fair.

- Free online sessions: E-gmat offers a lot of free verbal and strategies online sessions in which you can actually get a feel of virtual class room experience. I attended few and found them to be very useful. Specially the strategy session which has really useful tips.

I must have got you into thinking that e-gmat can’t do anything wrong. Unfortunately, like with all things, there is a flip side.

What does not work

- Website : The e-gmat website is a huge let down. The website is really clunky and very horribly designed. Even though it has nice look and feel to it , navigating through the website, hopping from video to another video is a night mare. One such example: You have type your bloody password every time you open e-gmat in a new tab. I think the designers never heard about the concept of called cookies !! They have recently moved from platform 1.0 to platform 2.0 but that hasn’t made any difference. It is still horrible. May they can take cue from Magoosh’s website - its sleek, elegant, simple and very user friendly.

- Questions : Though the e-gmat offers you heaps of concept files (questions are lumped into groups) to hone your skills but I have doubts about their claim of number of questions they offer (half of them are from their partner sites such as GMAT club test and 800score.com ) . There is no way you can tell that the number of questions you have got right, wrong etc. at given point in time. In fact if you want to revisit a specific question you can’t do that, you have to search through concept files, search for your question which is really tedious.

- Timing of sessions : Most of the free sessions are conducted at 7:30 pm IST which is 11:00 PM AEST. For me it was incredibly hard to attend those sessions live (recording links are made available the very next day). I know this might not be a problem to most of the other e-gmat users.

I personally believe if you are weak at Verbal then perhaps e-gmat verbal online is the best online course out in the market.

I am going to take the test again in November and hopefully score my dream score of 750 plus (I know, I know it’s very hard).

Wish me luck.

Thanks,
Sunny
P.S. GMATclub rocks !