E-Gmat Course Review

So My journey with GMAT started in Feb when I bought the E-Gmat subscription as suggested by a friend. It took me around 3-4 months to give my first attempt on GMAT and score a 720 (V38 Q50). I had given one official GMATPrep Mock before starting my preparation and scored a 670 (V31Q49). So that shall give you an idea where I was before beginning my attempt. I used only the E-Gmat course and Official Guides for my preparation. Apart from these 2 I used to practice GMATClub practice question banks occasionally as well but I seriously do not think they helped me much.

I will talk about how the course helped me:

SC: This was my weakest area in verbal, but I think E-Gmat's course is as fundamental as one needs to build his/her grammatical concepts. The way the course starts from the most basic blocks and build on most complicated concepts like modifiers is great. I do not think one needs to supplement this course with anything else. Once you have learnt all the fundamentals from this course, what is left is just how well you apply those fundamentals. There again E-GMAT does a great job in laying out a process for you to follow. Meaning is super important in GMAT SC and I have learned this the hard way. If you can develop a knack of comprehending the intending meaning early on, as the E-Gmat course teaches, applying grammatical concepts will become way easier. I suggest taking this aspect super seriously from the first sentence you read in your prep. Once you have built a habit of rushing through the meaning analysis part, it is very tough to train your mind to go the other way round. I still struggle with that just because I was complacent about this aspect in the beginning.

The questions scholoranium provides for SC encompasses all fundamental concepts of grammar application. If you do all of them and get 100% learning from their explanations, you will rarely learn anything new on SC. The only area of improvement I see here is that meaning based or rather hard meaning based questions in E-GMAT are a little less and those get tested heavily in GMAT.

CR: The CR course again is super conceptual. The way the course covers each question type is great and can help anyone learn from the scratch. The best take away from E-GMAT's CR course was Pre-Thinking. Though the term gets used in the GMAT world like a scientific concept, but it is not. It is a super elegant/simple way of solving CR problems. It is because of this simplicity that many students just ignore its importance (like me). I learnt from E-GMAT how important it is to read the question stem slowly and carefully and plan your line of attack. The E-Gmat course stresses on reading the stimulus as thoroughly as possible and I do not think there is any better advice possible for CR questions. I still fail on questions but only when I rush through the stimulus or through prethinking. Pre-Thinking becomes natural after a while, so you may need a little patience there. I don't think one needs to anticipate an answer in prethinking, planning a line of attack is just fine. Once you are sure about your line of attack, irrelevant options/ trap options would be visible to you. Thanks to this approach, by the end of my Prep CR had been my strongest suit.

RC: Even though I considered SC my weakest area, it turned out that RC was as weak as SC for me. Somewhere it still is weak. I was neither a voracious nor a fast reader. All my life I had read just simple texts. Even the books I used to read before GMAT Prep were mostly non fiction and had very simplistic language. E-GMAT course again offered the best advice of reading slowly upfront and understanding the passage thoroughly before going to questions. You may find other techniques such as reading passages in 2.5- 3 mins with 70% understanding and then rereading information each question asks but I strongly feel those strategies work only for people who already are good readers, who would anyways do good on RC. I tried all the approaches and worked super hard on RCs but the only approach that worked for me was one suggested by E-GMAT: Read the passage thoroughly in 4+ mins and then go to questions.

Quant: Overall the course teaches even the most fundamental things, I was already at 49 when I started quant so I kind of skimmed through the course but the way it has been made, it is good to raise quant score from any level. I believe the course fundamentals are explained in as simple ways as possible but the questions are tricky and lengthy. If speed is your problem on quant, E-GMAT can help as it throws super lengthy calculations at you at times. Even the explanations given by E-GMAT usually involved the theoretic approach of solving mathematics. This is a place where I feel E-GMAT Quant can do better. I find it doesn't teach you many smart ways of getting to the solution quickly.

Scholoranium: This is a great tool and by far the best I have seen so far in GMAT Prep. It gives you insights at so many levels that tracking your progress becomes super easy. It can even tell you what your accuracies are in each subsection such as Modifiers, Verbs etc. This just makes your prep more focussed. At last, the best value add of scholoranium is its explanations of each and every question. Even if you have a doubt you can just raise it to experts and they will answer that in a day. In most of the cases you will find most of your queries have already been answered in the doubts forum as some other student would have already raised it. Takt Time (and my struggles with it) was the most useful metric for me during my whole Prep.

Mentorship from DJ: For me, this was the most valuable part of the course. I was constantly in touch with DJ (E-GMAT's mentorship team member) over emails and I think this was the most valuable addition to my prep Yes course material and all helps but a guide there to help you charter out your whole path is of worth unexplainable. By the end, I had more than 100 emails in my email conversation with DJ. When to attempt questions, how to analyze a quiz, when to do revisions, when to give and not give mocks, how to track your progress are only a few of the aspects DJ helped me address. I never used to bother about revisions but I think that is one thing DJ used to stress a lot on and it does wonders many people like me did not expect.
I think at the end of the day you have to back your plan with data and given the sheer amount of data mentors on an E-GMAT team would have, they can clearly tell you what generally works and what doesn't. I always made it a point to validate my plans with DJ and that was very helpful.