Believe in and stick to the process

Coming from an engineering background, I was always confident of my quant abilities. But even after reading several different books to prepare for the verbal section, I was not confident of my verbal abilities, especially my CR and RC abilities. I attended free webinars on SC, CR and RC sections organised by e-GMAT and was impressed by its approach to the verbal section. Finally, I decided to sign up for the course as I prepared to give one last shot at the test.

e-GMAT assigns you a dedicated mentor from day one who helps you throughout your GMAT journey, providing weekly study schedule as well as motivating you from time to time. The verbal section begins with Master Comprehension section which lays foundation of your verbal ability. The SC section is based upon ‘meaning based approach’ which tremendously helps you in solving 700 level questions when grammar rules fail in helping you distinguish between answer choices. The CR section emphasises the ‘pre-thinking’ approach. The RC section teaches you ways to effectively read a GMAT passage, focussing on the bigger picture without getting bogged down into the details. Since, in verbal section, it is more about eliminating four wrong answer choices than selecting the correct answer choice, ways to identify wrong answer choices are taught. Trust me, it is very crucial to learn to eliminate wrong answer choices when it comes to verbal section. As is the case with verbal section, the quant section also contains a foundational module and is divided into different modules. Each module contains lectures on different topics, covering different quant abilities tested on GMAT.

Apart from the Sigma-X Mocks, the course content that helped me the most was cementing quizzes. These quizzes help you apply the skills that you learn by watching videos on the platform and ‘cement’ the concepts in your brain, making the complete solution process a natural reflex, a kind of muscle memory. This reflex boosts your confidence and saves time while solving a question. The platform also provides analytics of your accuracy and time for different question types in the sub-sections of both verbal and quant. These pictorials help you pin-point your strengths and weaknesses. You can either analyse these analytics yourself or simply drop an email to your mentor who provides his insight into your statistics. e -GMAT also provides one-on-one sessions with SMEs to help you with your preparation. These sessions are generally meant to pin-point your faltering points and to help you bridge any conceptual gap or make behavioural changes to your approach. One such session helped me identify my weakness and improve my CR ability, increasing my mock score by 30 points and eventually boosting my verbal score on the test. In addition to one-on-one session, the e-GMAT forum can be used for any queries pertaining to the concept or the process used to arrive at the answer. My only pain point was the Word Problems module of Quant section. I believe that word problem questions were way too lengthy and complicated to be solved within 2 min and not up to GMAT standards. These questions do teach you a systematic approach to solving different questions, but the module can, at times, become a bit overwhelming.

In the end, I would like to highlight the importance of sticking to the process. Believe in the process taught in the modules and no matter what do not change your process while under pressure during the test. I would like to thank my mentor Dhruv Sir and the complete e-GMAT team members for their support throughout my prep journey, and congratulate them on a job well done in developing the platform.