An E-gmat review, pros & cons

Here are my attempts
Attempt 1 (Feb 2021): 670 (V32, Q49)
Attempt 2 (Mar 2021): 680 (V32, Q50)
Attempt 3 (Aug 2021): 700 (V38, Q48)

Good improvement in Verbal, on the hand, got cocky and overconfident in Quant and screwed it up.

However, I thank E-GMAT for that V38 and in this post I’ll share why:

E-GMAT SC

1. Clever Approach to solving SC
I have taken another test prep's company's SC course (won't name them) before taking E-GMAT SC. The primary difference between the two courses is the approach. E-GMAT’s is based on understanding the meaning of a sentence while the other course focussed on “time-saving grammar hacks” to arrive at the answer, in which the meaning of the sentence took lower priority..Now if you are looking for a 650, the “time-saving grammar hack” approach works faster but when you are talking 700+ official GMAt questions, the GMAT is very clever, it will give multiple answer choices that are all grammatically correct, and it's the meaning that differentiates the correct answer from the wrong one. Therefore, I prefer the meaning-based approach because it helps solve tough questions much more quickly and easily.

2. Course contents really good, well taught
I’ve always sucked at tests that needed me to do well at English grammar because of the extremely confusing rules and tons of jargon English grammar has e.g "Participle Modifiers" or “Gerunds” or “Adverbial modifiers”. I mean, when I hear the term “Participle Modifiers", I experience severe mental pain, it causes me to get depressed and makes me want to eat an ice-cream to improve my mood. But hats off to E-GMAT because for the first time in my life I’ve come to like grammar and admire its beauty. E-GMAT teaches SC by avoiding these horrible sounding jargons and follows a very logical approach to explain each concept. And since it is logical, it's easy to remember, absorb and finally apply on the questions.

E-GMAT Critical Reasoning:
Some facts:
Attempt 1: CR % (based on my ESR) => 28%
Attempt 2: CR % (based on my ESR) => 28%
Attempt 3: CR % (based on my ESR) => 97% (I knew it, i wasn’t dumb!)

After my 2nd Attempt, I sent a desperation email to folks in E-Gmat’s support team telling them I follow their so-called “Pre-thinking approach” but it really isn’t taking me anywhere. They soon replied to understand how I did pre-thinking and then the problem was identified. I was spending about 50 seconds reading the argument, 10-15 seconds pre-thinking and then over 45 seconds on the answer choices. This was WRONG. They asked me to go for a 30-55-35 split, in which I was spending about 55-60 seconds pre-thinking. I immediately tried it and it worked well. I also got creative, tried to visualize the problem in a 3D manner (think of Iron Man, the 3D models floating in air, him using his hands to move models etc). The results are here, a 97% tile on CR. Thanks DJ & Archit for the guidance.


E-GMAT RC:
I had received really shitty RC advice from my previous GMAT test prep company. They had asked me to read the 1st line of each para, skip everything in between and then directly read the last line of each para and repeat this for every para. And then I was supposed to magically understand the main idea by combining these statements together and also only refer to the first and last line of each para to get a complete gist of each para. What a mess and what a waste of time, I can’t believe I did this for several months only to get confused and come to hate RC. So what worked for me in RC was E-GMAT’s webinar in which a guy called Rajat gave simple advice: read each and every sentence, not skip a single word. And also, E-GMAT’s timing strategy helped a lot as well, in which they told how many minutes to spend reading the passage, how many mins to spend per question etc. E-GMAT’s para summary idea is also good and I modified it a bit (See below)

HELPFUL TIP:
Make all these summaries in your mind and make them fast. Don’t spend 10-15 seconds thinking of a summary, another 5-10 seconds writing it down. Spend about 2-5 seconds thinking of a summary, if you feel a summary is hard to make in 2-5 seconds JUST MOVE ON!
Also, remember you don’t need to get all 4 out of 4 or 3 out of 3 right. So, sometimes when you don’t understand something in a particular para, try re-reading it if you think its important. If you still can’t understand, JUST MOVE ON because maybe if you are lucky you won’t have a single question on that tough part.


Another good part of EGMAT is the schloranium section in which I could easily take quizzes of varying difficulty and combine questions from different sections. The explanations section in Scholaranium is very helpful and the e-gmat team members reply within like a day.