Hugely disappointed

I started my GMAT journey in 2018. I did self-study for three weeks and went for the test just before Christmas in 2018. Scored 630 (Q44, V32). Disappointed, but with a full-time finance job that required me to work over 65 hours per week, I decided to divert my attention back to work. I have paused my MBA plan until early this year. I started self-prep again in mid-Jan. I tried out GMAT official mocks after studying for a month and scored 700 in both attempts. Not convinced by my mock scores, especially my inconsistent performance in the verbal section, I decided to sign up for a course specialized in verbal. The reviews on gmatclub for e-GMAT gave me a lot of confidence. Therefore, I decided to sign up for the full course, not only for verbal.

*Verbal Section*
SC: great for building fundamentals, but the course is very lengthy. The meaning-based approach, unfortunately, does not always work in the actual test. I would strongly advise against relying solely on e-GMAT to prepare for verbal. The sentence structures of some of the SC questions created by them are also quite bizarre. It is easy to see that the non-native speakers wrote those sentences.
CR: Sorry to be blunt, but the lectures created by them are quite useless. Using their approach, I guarantee most would not be able to solve the questions within 2.5 minutes. Their explanations are way too long. For those official questions, I could understand the official explanations better than their lengthy solutions.
RC: Ancient materials. Not worth the time.

*Quant*
Overall: only for building fundamentals. If you are below Q40, you can use that to learn the concepts then utilize their quizzes to identify weak areas. Once you hit Q45 or above in mock, DO NOT rely solely on e-GMAT anymore. I realized a big mistake I made was not checking out other test prep companies' courses. I have almost completed all e-GMAT quant quizzes before my official tests. When I signed up for a trial of another test prep company lately, I found out many of the concepts were not taught on e-GMAT. I was only able to encounter those concepts in one or two of those e-GMAT quizzes.

Quant Scholaranium: A great portal to identify weak areas. Really accurate because it correctly identified my weakest spot being number properties - my accuracy on number properties was only 50%; In contrast, the rest were all 85-100% in the M-H level questions in my official GMAT test. But their questions are unnecessarily long. When I did my official GMAT test recently, none of the items are THAT LONG. Even for word problems! The average time I spent on solving official quant questions are less than 1.5 minute, but e-GMAT questions could take up to 3 -4 minutes to solve! I voiced my frustration to my e-GMAT coach who followed up with my weekly progress. He asked me to give him some examples of questions that required longer than 2.5 minutes to solve. I could give him a whole list of 50+ questions honestly. But I gave him three examples. He said he would show me how to solve in 2 minutes - but guess what - he did not follow up on that! I m 100% sure no one can do that. I attempted the questions again a few times following their approach - I could even remember the approach by heart - and I still could not solve in 2 minutes. And the statistics of students who had solved these questions correctly also showed that they had to spend over 3 minutes! I am so upset by the time wasted on solving problems that do not represent the actual styles of GMAT questions.

In summary, I utterly regret wasting time on this course. I might have been able to progress faster by taking the courses of other test prep companies. As someone who started with 700 in official mock, I feel incredibly frustrated with the zero improvements after having spent MORE THAN four months on this. The zoom calls with the coach were pointless, too - all I get is some simple advice that I can give it to myself, like reading the economists/ keeping track of time at regular intervals. I m not someone starting at 500ish. And I had been doing those things even before signing on E-GMAT.

What stunned me the most is I scored 710, and 740 in the official mocks before my official test but ended up with 640 (in test center) then 660 (online GMAT).

I never slacked off on any day despite my demanding job- I kept error logs, reviewed mistakes kept on practicing, and followed their advice.

With such an unfortunate result after four months of dedicated work, I could only pin down to the following problems with e-GMAT:
1) not all essential quant concepts are covered in their "concept files"/ "practice files"/ "application files"
2) CR techniques completely not applicable in actual tests
3) SC meaningful approach does not always work
4) Lectures are only useful for those starting with 500-650 in official mocks. Cannot help breakthrough 700 barrier, unless someone is already proficient in quant (scoring Q50-51) and only need to polish verbal a bit.

I m sure e-GMAT might work for some, but if you are short on time, e-GMAT is not the course for you to boost the score from 600 sth to 700 or above in 1-3 months. And DO NOT rely on it to learn all concepts. Take its SC/ CR approach with a grain of salt. I have learned from pain.

I never really want to write such a review - but I find it necessary to tell my story. These four months were incredibly crucial to me, and the time wasted could have significant repercussions on my MBA applications.