e-GMAT review by Akhil Agrawal

Strengths:

- Scholaranium with excellent set of questions
- Course structure
- PACE platform which can adjust course completion timing based on pre-acquired skills
- Excellent mentor support

Would make the product better:

- The Error log can be too overwhelming and may lose bit of value for some students
- The number of questions can be increased (the more the better)

My name is Akhil Agrawal and I completed my first GMAT focus attempt on 20th September 2024 with a score of 685. I did my preparation through e-GMAT team. When I started my preparation, I had decent understanding of the Quant (because of my engineering back ground) but I lacked the ability to tackle verbal questions from their root. I did not have much familiarity with the Data Interpretation section. Additional hurdle for me was my rustiness in handling competitive exams after being not involved in one for 10 years. Quant being my strength helped me get a decent score in the test mock and I got enrolled into the Last Mile Push program of e-GMAT. This turned out be very helpful as I was assigned a dedicated mentor, who guided me throughout my GMAT journey. She prepared a detailed work plan, helped me with analysis of my quiz results and suggested relevant improvement points. Additionally, she kept regular checks on me and suggested right strategies which proved instrumental in my overall GMAT success.

The 3 most critical areas where e-GMAT team helped me are as follows:
- Solidify my conceptual ability in Verbal: Earlier, I used to rush while reading RCs (to save time) and never understood the how to tackle the reasoning in CR questions. The e-GMAT verbal course is designed beautifully from basics and provides the right tools to handle these challenges. I got good clarity in tackling CR questions and utilized effective reading strategies. This also gave me a boost of morale in Verbal, which I always considered as my weakness.
- Time managing and Exam sequence strategies – The median timings mentioned in solutions give a very nice reference point for start. However, each person needs to design his/her own strategy. One of my weaknesses was to get stuck on a question (especially in Quant) without letting it go. This was very detrimental for overall result. I will give a lot of credit to my e-GMAT mentor who pushed me hard to overcome this weakness. Additionally, she altered my exam sequence pattern which straight away gave me a boost of 20-30 points.
- Practice Quizzes & Mock exams – Scholaranium has really good quality questions. If utilized properly, it can help in robust preparation for the exam. The course is designed to first learn the concept and then cement them properly so they remain lasting without very regular practice as well. Additional feature of scholaranium is generating custom full section as well as topic-based quizzes with very good analysis. Overall Scholaranium is a great platform to practice and get prepared for GMAT.

I also utilized the GMAT focus section tests as well as the huge question bank on GMAT club for my preparation. A few tips that I would like to give to GMAT aspirants is that time management is very critical – my observation has been that leaving even a question un-attempted has a very big penalty which brings down the score drastically. Additionally, I was pleasantly surprised how change of sequence of sections can also create a good difference in final GMAT score. Changing my usual pattern from Q-V-DI to Q-DI-V proved to be very helpful. Additionally, the free official mock tests on mba.com are quite simple in compared to the actual exam. So, be careful in judging yourself just based on the 2 free mock tests.