Best resource for Verbal!

I enrolled with e-GMAT the day after I saw 640 (V34 Q44) on my in my first official mock in May 2022 . I hadn't prepared for the mock but I had gone through video lessons from an Indian GMAT prep company called Career Launcher. I was far from target score of 740+ and I didn't think Career Launcher notes would be enough and so I started looking for other GMAT prep companies. I came across e-GMAT through GMAT club and I was impressed by the testimonials. I attend one of their free SC webinars and decided to schedule a free consultation call with them. After talking to the consultant, I signed up with them and gave their Sigma X-mock and scored a 580. I wasn't concerned about the overall score because I had read that the official score is usually 40-50 points higher than Sigma-X mocks. It did give me a very comprehensive snapshot of my weak and strong areas. My verbal was better than my quants. CR was a bigger concern than SC and RC was good. Algebra needed the most work among the quant topics. So I started with quants. Unfortunately, when I came to the cementing stage for the first section, I couldn't pass it no matter how much I tried. Dejected, I decided to study quants from elsewhere as it seemed like I wasn't improving. I think the problem was that their questions were extremely lengthy and I found myself running out of time. Their course is good but I wasn't a fan of their quant questions.

Eventually, I turned to them for verbal and found that that was one of the best decisions for my GMAT prep. This was exactly 2 months before my test date. I am enlisting below the things I liked the most about them (this is only relevant for their verbal content):

1. The course: Brilliant! The video format is crucial for understand nuances of sentence structure, grammar rules, and how to apply the approach they teach in real time. It is simple and very well sorted. It can look daunting but I found that it clarified my concepts so well that I could eliminate incorrect choices in questions with solid reasons easily. I don't think there is anything that their course doesn't teach.

2. Meaning-based approach and pre-thinking: I can safely say that the meaning-based approach is infallible. Not only that, when I could not remember the grammar rule for something, the meaning-based approach always came to my rescue. It worked almost every time. For CR, I had thought I wouldn't use pre-thinking because it seemed like it would take too much of my time and what if I wasn't able to pre-think the CA? I would be further confused when I looked at the options. But boy, was I wrong! Pre-thinking doesn't teach you to think of the CA for the question. Noone could possibly think of the exact CA in all situations. It teaches you to analyse and process the information in the passage such that you can come up with a FRAMEWORK for how the answer should look like or on what logic the answer should be based. That was game-changing! My ESR reveals that I answered correctly 100% of the CR questions I attempted. I had come a long way from CR being my weakest section of verbal.

3. Scholaranium: After my experience with quant questions, I was wary of scholaranium verbal questions. I was wrong. These questions were the key to my consistent success in verbal (V41 is my lowest in all of my official mocks and my real test). They are slightly more nuanced than the official questions but they teach you everything you need to know to answer all kinds of questions on the GMAT. If you have practiced enough of these questions (and analysed them well), rest assured that you will not struggle with verbal! RC questions weren't my favourite but CR and SC questions were everything and more! The explanations given for each option clarified so many of my gaps!

4. Last and most important/helpful: I had very little time left and I was struggling with completing my verbal course with e-GMAT and my quants course with the other prep company (TTP). At this point (about a month before my actual test), I reached out to their support team asking for a mentor. Rashmi, one of the mentors and strategy experts at e-GMAT, responded within 24 hours. In my last one month before the test, Rashmi has been a constant support and a guiding light for me. I reached out to her for all my little and big concerns regarding my prep. She always returned with encouraging words and a very structured plan to make improvements. She respected my decision to not do quants questions on their platform and still gave me guidance on how to go about quants OG practice. I followed her advice and was able to score 760 in the official mocks. Her guidance was instrumental in my success!

One extra thing that I absolutely loved was their application files. I watched Payal solve so many questions in those videos following the step-by-step approach that it was finally ingrained in me. Those were extremely helpful!

It might look like I am simping for about them but this is genuinely how I feel about them, especially their verbal course. If you're studying with them, you're verbal at least is sorted!