V28 to V38

My GMAT journey started in the Spring of 2020. Like most other GMAT candidates, I started by studying from books by a big brand test prep company and the Official Guides. I familiarized myself with all the stuff that is tested on the GMAT and studied for three months, thinking that was enough time. I took a few mock tests in that period, but my score was never consistent. My best score was 670(Q48, V34), but I was never able to get that score again and was never able to break the threshold. After three months of prep, I took a break from the GMAT. Demoralized and frustrated, I thought that the GMAT wasn’t for me.
Months passed, but I was not happy with myself. I always thought to myself “What if I was just following the wrong strategy until now?” Finally, at the beginning of 2020, I committed to preparing for the GMAT again but decided to change my approach this time. After a lot of research, I decided to sign up for the e-GMAT verbal course. I heard about the company several times on the GMAT Club forum, and watched some of their live sessions on YouTube, but I finally decided to give them a try. After spending a little over two months on the e-GMAT course, I can definitely see the improvement in my verbal score. I was able to go from low 30’s to high 30’s and even a 40 one time on the mocks. Below are some of the reasons why the e-GMAT verbal course stood out to me:
For SC, the e-GMAT meaning based approach is a game changer. I had gotten decent at eliminating wrong answers by noticing splits in the answer choices, but sometimes ended up with two answers to choose from and ended up guessing between those two. The verbs module was the most helpful and the content was delivered in a way that made it easy to visualize the timeline of events happening in a sentence.
For CR, the structure-based approach helped me break down the passage and understand it better. I had studied the negation technique for solving assumption questions earlier but was never quite able to apply that well in an argument. The e-GMAT approach to pre-thinking falsification questions helped me apply the negation technique in a better way, and this approach helped me improve my CR accuracy.
The RC section of verbal has been the trickiest for me. It’s something that you can’t guess on entirely and it can be the most time-consuming portion of the verbal section. I am not a fast reader and don’t comprehend well what I read. My biggest fear in the verbal section is getting two RC passages back-to-back, and then getting derailed for the rest of the test. The submersion technique taught by e-GMAT helped me get involved in the passage and this definitely helped me do better on RC.
I found the e-GMAT’s scholaranium to be a great source for verbal questions. After exhausting the OG, I didn’t have a good repository of questions to practice from, but I was surprised by the level of questions that scholaranium has. The analytics provided by the e-GMAT tool is also great. It really helps you analyze your weak areas and helps measure accuracy. Also, the kind of support provided by the e-GMAT team is great. Though I didn’t ask a lot of questions on the forum, as the thread below each question had detailed discussions between students, who had similar doubts, and the mentors, the few times that I did ask a question, I got a prompt response from Kanupriya.
Looking back, I think the e-GMAT verbal course added the most value to my GMAT prep journey. I would highly recommend it.