Improved Verbal score from V36 to V40 with the help of e-gmat

Quick summary:

GMAT Attempt 1 - 5th November 2020 - Q49, V36 - 700
GMAT Attempt 2 - 30th June 2021 - Q48, V40 - 710
GMAT Attempt 3 - To be given in July 2021 - I'll update my score in this review at the end of this month.

Preparation:

I am an engineer by education and work in the Venture capital industry for the past 4 years. Owing to my engineering background, I had assumed at the beginning that I'll need more preparation in Verbal than in Quant. It turned out to be partially true.

For my first attempt in November 2020, I started preparation seriously in August first week. Before that I had already spent some money on Experts Global course, given 1-2 mock tests with passive preparation, and had acquainted myself with the exam structure etc.

I started my CR prep with Powerscore CR - which was an amazing resource to start with. It was too long a read, because it explains everything in absolute detail, but it was worth it because it cleared my concepts about CR questions and how to approach them. With some practice, I could already see some improvement in CR. I was still not practicing pre-thinking though. Although I had a fair idea of what the right answers could be like.
SC - I started with Manhattan SC book. It was good for grammar basics, but beyond a point, it didn't help much. I think SC is my strongest section today and I give full credit for that to GMAT Club community. I practiced a lot of SC Questions and analyzed every choice for every error in both the questions that I did right and wrong. Over time I created a framework for myself and practiced that framework on every question. While reading the sentence itself, I was able to identify the subject, verb, and different clauses in the sentence. Then while scanning for differences in the options, I could choose between the right and wrong options. Until this time, I wasn't absolutely clear about the meaning-based approach.

RC - I will admit, I thought it will be the easiest bit and in the beginning, I didn't pay much attention to it. But by the end, RC is what became the bottleneck. I wasn't writing any notes in my RCs, I was reading the passage and comprehending up to 70% of it before I moved to answer choices. This approach, as I later found out, would not take me to V40+.

Quant - I was foolishly overconfident about this in the beginning. I thought that with little practice, I could get to Q50 and I wouldn't settle for anything lesser. But I was so underconfident about my quant preparation in the end that I got nervous in the exam. I still don't know how I managed to get even Q49.

I gave one mock every weekend for 8-9 weeks and I finished all GMAT official mocks, a few free mocks by veritas, manhattan etc. because I didn't want to leave anything before the final exam. I was scoring 710-730 in my mocks. And I was aspiring for 750+. At 700, I rejected the score then and there and decided to give the exam again.

But I took a long break for some personal and work reasons and started the preparation in March end eventually by taking the e-gmat subscription.

Second Attempt -

I started from March end/April beginning. e-gmat team recommended that I give their Sigma-X mock first, so I did and scored 670 on that, I was out of practice after 4-5 months. I wanted to improve my RC in the beginning so I spent 2-3 weeks only on RC. Finished all RC modules that e-gmat had. I was severely lacking in my RC skills which improved only once I started taking notes and practiced e-gmat's method of solving RCs. It was revolutionary for me, and I'm not being paid to say this lol.

I also knew about e-gmat's pre-thinking approach for CR and I wanted to see if it helped. After doing only a few question types with their standard pre-thinking approach, I could feel the difference. The understanding of the question and the answer that you're looking for becomes multifold once you pre-think the answer. It reduces the chances of errors, and improves speed eventually. I also started taking few notes in CR.

After that, I started focusing on my quant too. I did a couple of their modules but frankly, it was taking too much time. I was impatient and always tried to jump the gun by skipping modules here and there. It ensured that I never got the concept right and always faltered in difficult questions in almost every concept. I realized this too late. After consecutively scoring 710-740 in my mocks, I realized that I am in the same situation as the last time, and I sought help from e-gmat. Dhananjay (DJ) from e-gmat got in touch with me, helped me make sense of my scores, and prepared a broad-level plan for me to reach my target of 750. I can say that I tried to follow his plan but I couldn't take the complete value out of that mentorship. I should have reached out to him more when I wasn't getting the desired results. I started giving custom quizzes every day and took a false sense of satisfaction in decent results in them. But the reality is, GMAT is tougher because of the actual exam pressure.

I was confident that my preparation is such that I cannot score below 730. But I did. And for better or worse, I cannot settle at 710, so I will be giving my retest this month. DJ is still helping me with another customized plan and tells me that I have to follow it this time and I can reach my target score. :)

I'll let you guys know how it turns out.