egmat verbal online - must do course for verbal

I started by GMAT preparation a year back. I initially enrolled for classroom program at a bid time coaching firm. In my first attempt at GMAT, I scored a 640. I was pretty disappointed and immediately booked for another exam slot in one month. In my next attempt, I scored a 680. While I did better than in my previous attempt, the score was below my threshold. I did not have much issue in quant but my verbal score was not very good.

I was not sure on why I was not getting the score I needed. I did not book for another exam slot immediately as I figured that unless I change my preparation strategy, I might end up getting another score in 600s.

2-3 months passed and I did not focus on GMAT (I guess I wanted a break from the preparation). A friend of mine recommended e-GMAT to me. He had taken the verbal prep course and found it beneficial. I checked out the website and decided to enroll for the verbal part.

The SC portion in e-gmat was pretty good. e-gmat focuses on the concepts rather than just eliminating answers coz they don't sound good (I always eliminated "being", but then e-gmat taught me that there are cases when "being can be correct also).

The key to getting the SC correct is to master the concepts and keep applying it on the 700+ questions in 1 - 1.5 minutes.

Initially, I did not practice for CR as I figured that this section needs no preparation. A lot of ppl were talking about "pre-thinking" and I never really understood the fuss behind it. But my accuracy in CR was not high and I had to confront myself on it. I started focusing on "pre-thinking" concept. I would not say that I mastered it, but it definitely helped.

For RC, I focused on creating para summaries in order to derive the intention of the passage. I always ran out of time till I reached the 4th passage in the exam. I could only attempt the 4th passage if it was an easy topic and if it took me ~1 min to read it. Even with the new exam pattern, I still had to face 4 RC passages. That puts a lot of emphasis on decoding the passage quickly.

Overall, I would say that e-gmat was quite useful in my preparation. I would recommend it to anyone looking to improve his/her verbal score.