600 to 690 With E-GMAT's Support - V25 to V36, Q48 to Q49

Hi Fellow Test-takers,

Hope your preparations are going good. I just wanted to update you on how my GMAT journey has been. So, the milestone 700 has been in my target list from 2016, right when I got my first job. To give a background, I am a finance guy with 4 years of Work experience based out of Bangalore aged about 24.

Attempt1 :

Well, I did not research a lot about the exam and how I should prepare for it. Meanwhile, my work kept me busy and in the process the professional exams intrigued me and enrolled for a couple -CIPM and CFA. After finishing those, my focus got shifted to GMAT after gaining 2 years of work experience. So one of my friends who also struggled as I suggested that Princeton Review Private tutoring is good. So, me and him enrolled for the course. Well, it did not work for me as they have a very simple mindset and assumed everyone knows basics about the exam and the syllabus.

After giving a couple of mocks I realized something's wrong in my preparation. So went to GMAT club read a couple of reviews and purchased E-GMAT verbal course in 2019. I went through the complete course couple of times and took the Exam in Aug 2019 only to find out that my preparation was not good enough to beat the 700 score though my performance in Scholaranium was good. So I ordered the ESR and asked for Rajat's opinion. He said I should give it a try again.

Sources: PR Material, E-GMAT Verbal Course, GMAT Club Tests, MGMAT for Quant.
Score: 600 (Q48 V25)

Attempt2: (2020 - 2021)

This time I decided that I will not spend a lot of money on Prep and hence completely relied on GMAT Club, Free webinars from various Test Prep Companies and GMAT Club points to buy Veritas Tests and GMAT Tests.

So before starting my prep, I looked at my ESR and reflected on how I prepared myself in the past for the exam. I realized that I considered GMAT to be of the same type as those professional exams that I took and I prepared in the same way. So, I realized that I need to approach it differently by going about practicing questions gave an official mock and my Quant score is still at 48 but my verbal score was 30. I started preparing in August 2020 focusing completely on Verbal SC and RC. I made sure that I do a couple of passages from GMAT club daily irrespective and trust me, it just increases your comprehension speed for SC and CR as well. After a month into my preparation I got CORONA and luckily recovered from it.

Post which, I started my preparation in February 2021 again, using MGMAT Quant and Verbal books, RON Videos, OGs for practice. I gave a mock sometime at the end of February and realized I could only get my score to 650. My major issues are with CR.

E-GMAT's Entry into My Prep again:

I attended E-GMATs Quant Workshop during the beginning of March, post which I got a link for a free strategy call with one of their experts -Vaibhav, who showed me a profile of one their students in Scholaranium. I realized that there is a sequence to follow for improvements in each of the verbal and Quant sections. I saw a gradual progress in each of the sections using what they call Cementing Quizzes. He suggested me to take a Sigma X mock and shared the link for the test. In-fact he even followed me up to check whether I have taken the test. So, I gave it on a Sunday and got 660 with a very low CR score. I went through my performance using the analytics of Sigma X mocks. I think they gave me a pretty accurate representation of my performance in each of the sub sections. And then I had a call with Vaibhav again and we analyzed my score in Sigma X mock and he offered me a one month course.

After a lot of speculation I decided to take up the course and pushed my exam by a month to April 22 2021. So, the first thing Vaibhav asked me to do was to drop an email to E-GMAT's support team for the plan and to decide how I should prepare. I tell you they are very prompt and they analyzed my performance again in Sigma -X mock and my ESR and they assigned me a mentor DJ (name sounds fancy I know) who forwarded me something called E-GMAT's bible for preparing GMAT. It was pretty elaborate: mentioned when I should take Quizzes to cement my methods, what are the target scores I should aim for in each of the Quizzes and what I should do in case I did not get the target scores. I decided to follow it blindly and also built a study plan using the E_GMAT's platform.

Verbal Prep:

I am not promoting or anything, I think everybody who's been through E-GMAT's verbal course would tell that the course's Master comprehension and SC module are really good. After going through the course I can see my scores improved in SC and RC tremendously but I still had trouble with CR. Here I reached out again and he gave me a plan as to how I should revise and take quizzes for CR. Believe me it worked.

QUANT Prep:

To be very frank I liked their Quant course better than their verbal. It implemented something called XPert architecture in which every sub concept in Quant starts with a Diagnostic quiz including Medium and Hard questions and suggests you which sections you can skip and which you cannot based on your performance. I realized that I had gaps in Word Problems and Geometry and frankly I liked how Shwetha ma'am used real world explanations in Geometry. One small thing I didn't like about Quant questions in E-GMAT is that they are pretty dense and the actual GMAT questions are not that dense and focus more on logic and E-GMAT's solutions are more process oriented. There are gaps in the course, which you can cover from GMAT Club Quant book.

Overall:

I did not get sufficient time to go through official questions this time but I was sure that E-GMAT scholranium questions covered all the topics. What I liked about Sigma-X mocks is that for every test you take, an additional 200 questions get added to your Scholaranium. By today, I have about 1000 questions in Quant and 1000 questions in Verbal and I finished four of Sigma X mocks in which I score, 660, 680, 750 and 700. The forum moderators are also prompt in answering the queries and it did cover all my doubts.

Score: 690 (Q49 , V36)
Sources: E-GMAT's GMAT Online Course, GMAT Club Quant Workbook and the material in the below link:

https://gmatclub.com/forum/ultimate-gmat-quantitative-megathread-244512.html#p1886497 - QUANT Guide by GMAT Club

Mocks: Sigma X mocks (660, 680, 750, 700), Veritas Prep (700, 710, 720) Mocks, Official Mock tests 5 & 6 (710, 720), GMAT Club tests (Q48~50).