Native Speaker improves from V38-V44 with e-GMAT, scoring 760

This review is for e-GMAT's full online course priced at $349. I'm a native-born American and a working professional, out of school for 8 years and recently decided to switch careers to pursue MBA. It has been about 10 years since my last standardized test, and when I used to take tests, I usually scored very well without much study. So, I expected the GMAT to be like that.

To my surprise, no matter how hard I studied or how much time I put in, I could not break the low 700's barrier. I consistently scored 690-720 on various practice tests sampled from many GMAT courses. On Dec 8 2020, when I took the real GMAT, I scored a 710. I cancelled my scores (my target was 730) and decided right then that I needed the help of experts.

I enrolled in e-GMAT and in a nutshell, I was overall extremely satisfied with the product they delivered. I adhered to a strict, daily study plan that they provided for 2 months, from Dec 13- Feb 13 culminating in a test on Feb 13, 2021. I scored a 760 V44/Q49, up from the 710 V38/Q49. I spent 6 weeks on Verbal and 2 weeks on Quant. If I had spent 2-3 more weeks on Quant with their material, I have no doubt I would have scored 50 or 51. The week before the test, I had only completed about 40% of the material and so had decided that improving Quant was too late for me.

I want to make this review helpful to any native-born speakers who may be skeptical. e-GMAT may be, at first, difficult to get used to if you are an American, as the company is based in India and all the videos have speakers sporting an unashamed accent. But, if you stick with it and make no excuses for yourself, you will learn a lot. You do have to swallow your pride and realize you don't know much about English. I went from V38 to 44, and I could not have done it without learning the concepts and the processes provided by e-GMAT.

I would attribute a big reason for my improvement to active participation in Scholaranium (their question and quiz bank). Although I wish they had more questions in the question bank (you can easily run out of questions and need to budget well), I believe they restrict the # of questions because of the importance of reviewing your past questions.

Never have I ever reviewed my own mistakes as in-depth as before. When I would review incorrect choices in the past, I would usually think "ah, I was very close, I just won't be so careless next time!" But e-GMAT stresses the importance of revision and to understand not only why you selected the wrong answer but also rejected the correct answer. Therefore, I started to understand the test-makers' thought processes and to spot subtle, detailed traps.

I found myself frequently battling it out in their solutions forum, arguing why my solution was the correct choice. Sometimes, I would come across certain SC questions and think that the correct choice was so awkward... In the real world, native speakers would not think that this is a good English sentence! I would write passionately why e-GMAT's solution was wrong, or how the question/sentence was not clear or awkward. But always in the end, I would indignantly realize that the correct answer choice was slightly a better choice than mine, or that my thought process had logical gaps.

I was lucky, half way through my study (around 40 days before the test) to have been enrolled in their Last Mile Push, where I was assigned a mentor (shoutout to Ashutosh) who would tell me what sections to study or what scores I needed to get on certain quizzes. This helped me not make excuses for myself (for example, if the target score was 70% and I got a 65% I would think that it was close enough. But my mentor would say that I failed and needed to redo that section).

Last Mile Push also made me realize I was not studying enough, and to commit to 3 hours a day of studying and 6 hours a day on the weekends. This was the most insane amount of time I've dedicated to studying but I stuck with it.

I did not take any of the SigmaX Mock tests (e-GMAT's practice tests) from Dec 13 until Jan 30, a full 6 weeks after I started my journey with e-GMAT. During this 2 week period before the real test, I took 3 different mocks, scoring 740, 700 and 720. It turns out that the Sigma Mock Tests are a lot harder than the real GMAT, as on test day, I found myself wondering why the test seemed so easy.

The rest is history and I would like to say props to e-GMAT for sharing their process in such a clear, consistent and rigorous manner. Though sometimes it was not intuitive for me to know how to follow the study plan, their support stuff was always on standby to answer any questions or evaluate my results for me.

Their newly revamped Quant course has a new style of teaching, boasting variety of activities. I would definitely say that it helped me solidify my number properties understanding. However, I did not spend enough time on their Quant section to give a detailed review, as I was still in the "re-learning" process of Quant when I took the test.

Some quick cons to provide balance for this review:
- the Personalized Study Plan recommended to me through AI was very inconsistent with the one recommended by my mentor. I was lucky to have had a bit more personal guidance on this.
- Scholaranium ran out of questions so I had to practice solving additional questions using GMAT club forum
- the course is intensively concept and process-focused, and no test-taking skills or strategies are provided. If you enroll, be prepared to spend a lot of time to re-program your mind on verbal and quant concepts. You might do worse at first as you are assimilating a new process. For test taking strategies, I had to watch a few videos and read a few blog posts outside of eGMAT to learn some tricks for time management
- I couldn't finish the course in 2 months despite putting in 27 hours a week