e-GMAT SC course did wonders!

Who am I?
I am a non-native English speaker with an engineering background. When I started my GMAT preparation, I was sure that I would not take any coaching class and learn through self-preparation. As is the case with most other engineering students, I had a strong hand on quant, but I lacked the necessary verbal skills tested on the exam. For me, those 75 minutes of the Verbal section were the real deal. Therefore in the context of the review, I am just going to talk about how I dealt with this specific section. I had an average GPA in college. Therefore, I really wanted a stellar GMAT score to offset my undergrad GPA.

How did I prepare for my first GMAT?
For the entire verbal section (SC, CR and RC), I used Manhattan strategy guides to learn the concepts tested. In fact, I read some of these strategy guides twice to really absorb the content and learn its application. I then practiced all the problems in the OG. Honestly, I was not at all confident with my preparation a week before my exam. In my official mocks, I scored in the range of 690 – 720, with a consistent score of Q50 in math and highly varying score (V31 – V37) in verbal.
On the actual exam day in June 2015, I scored a total score of 700 (Q50 V34, IR8, AWA 5.5). I was highly disappointed in myself as I personally believed that I could have done a lot better. I decided to take some time off and focus on my work.

What did I learn from my first GMAT?
I realized that I was very poor on time management throughout the verbal section. In some way or the other, I was always short of time, adding more stress on myself. Upon brainstorming, I realized that the reasons for poor time management were – stamina issues by the end of the exam, a poor foundation of concepts on tougher problems of GMAT, and added stress that was in a circular loop with my poor time management.

What did I decide to do after my first GMAT?
Three things –
1. Have a strong foundation of the concepts tested on GMAT
2. Have good time management on different sections
3. Have no surprises during the test – essentially minimize the stress that builds up during the exam

How did I prepare for my second GMAT?
After realizing the two broad focus areas of my preparation, I decided to purchase the sentence correction module of e-GMAT and Powerscore CR Bible. I spoke to a lot of folks who had been in the same situation as the one I was in, and most of them recommended these two books. I didn’t pursue anything for RC as I had a strong reason for that. My new strategy was to become extremely accurate and quick in sentence correction as out of the three, it has the least amount of gray area. With added time at hand, I could then devote a good chunk of my time in both RC and CR.
e-GMAT’s course is very nicely tailored to help almost anyone understand the basic concepts of grammar. I would highly recommend it to folks who have tirelessly put significant effort in their verbal preparation and still see little returns. With this newly found strong foundation in sentence correction, I then read through posts of Ron Purewal on Manhattan forum. This helped me train my ear on what the GMAT prefers. Over time, I started loving sentence correction problems. My accuracy went from somewhere around 60% to almost 90%. You would wonder how doing extremely well on one section is good enough to achieve a stellar score. Well, allow me to break the myth here. I was able to tackle CR and RC problems a lot more comfortably as I was never really short on time. So essentially, my first goal (have a strong foundation of concepts) helped me achieve my second goal (have good time management). Before the exam, I took four days off from work to get up to speed. In this last one week, I achieved my third goal, which was that there should be no surprises. I took official mocks every single day starting from Saturday and scored the following in CAT 3, 4, 5 and 6: 770, 760, 750, 760 (in the same order). Although CAT 3 and 4 were repeat tests, CAT 5 and 6 were not. This made me confident that I can score well and that all I need to do is achieve my three goals that didn’t go very well for my first exam.
On the actual exam day (Thursday, October 20, 2016), I got up at 11 AM and watched an episode of South Park while having lunch, a habit that I repeated for all my mocks. I went to the test center with an extremely calm head. In AWA, I was left with 6 minutes at hand after I wrote an essay that I was happy with. In IR, I was again left with 7 minutes when I was on the last question (got 11/12 correct). Again in Quant, I finished the paper 11 minutes earlier. In Verbal, I was always a minute or two ahead of time and that helped me take care of the stress I used to face. I was able to answer all the sentence correction questions very comfortably and quickly. As I had some good amount of time saved from SC section, I spent that time on CR and RC to really be sure that I am marking the right answer. Everything was going well and very consistent with my experience from mocks. And well, the results were very consistent too – I scored a 760 (Q50 V41, IR 8, AWA 5.5)!

Thanks to e-GMAT for helping me get past the barriers that I faced in my first GMAT!

Cheers,
Tariq