Finally managed to score 710

This was my fourth attempt at the GMAT and I knew that this was probably going to be my last chance at breaking the 700 barrier. I gave my first attempt back in 2017 and I got a below 600 score. It was self-study using Official books, Manhattan guides and YouTube videos. For my next two attempts in 2018 (610 Q44 V31) and 2019 (640 Q48 V31) I enrolled for e-GMAT but I could not do the course properly and had to rush through the course because of my personal and work commitments. The way e-GMAT course is built, I knew it was the only course that was going to help me break the 700 barrier. So naturally I decided to go with e-GMAT for my fourth attempt and it finally worked wonders as I was finally able to get a score of 710 Q49 V37.

I started with Verbal section, and covered each topic as designed in the course. e-GMAT SC course is pure gold. All the topics in SC is super simplified. Meaning based approach in SC set a solid foundation for solving SC questions. Once you understood what the sentence was trying to communicate, it was easy to eliminate all the incorrect answer choices by applying the grammar rules. Meaning based approach was especially helpful when you have two grammatically correct choices and you have to eliminate the incorrect choice. CR course is based on Pre-thinking approach. At the start of the course, all the different parts of CR passage such as premise, fact, claim, conclusion, main conclusion, author’s point etc are clearly defined. Honestly it takes time to completely hone the pre thinking approach to arrive at assumptions. But once you consistently follow the step-by-step method to find conclusion, falsification condition and assumptions, solving CR questions using pre thinking approach becomes easy. Once I fully got the hang of the approach, I never took notes while solving CR questions. Arriving at assumptions even before looking at the answer choices saves you a lot of time while eliminating answer choices, which eventually helped me in pacing the test. While solving RC questions you use few concepts learnt in CR course. I always felt that RC was my weak area. So, I focused more on improving my ability in SC and CR than on spending too much effort on RC. One thing that I did differently this time in my preparation was that I used the cementing quizzes after each section diligently to get the desired accuracy in medium and hard questions before proceeding with the next section. This helped solidify the concepts I learned during the initial stages. I realized the value of doing cementing quizzes when I returned to verbal course again after months of doing Quant section. When revising I did not spend much time relearning the concepts, saving myself a lot of time.

Qaunt course in e-GMAT has improved significantly from 2018. The new Quant 2.0 was detailed and the summary at the end of each section was helpful during revision. I followed the same approach for qaunt with regards to cementing quizzes – getting desired accuracies in both medium and hard questions, before proceeding with next topic.

Scholaranium is a wonderful tool from e-GMAT. This is super helpful when you want to solidify your learnings, improve time management and understand your strong or weak area by giving mixed quizzes – combining all the sections in verbal or different sections in quant. By giving multiple cementing quizzes, ability quizzes and ability quizzes you are improve both your accuracy and your ability while getting comfortable with skipping questions during the tests. Do not forget to do strategic review and make notes after each attempt and before giving another attempt. OG questions feel relatively easier than the questions in scholaranium.

Lastly, the support from the e-GMAT team was wonderful. They supported me with my queries, with my subscription extensions and also pointed out my weaknesses and a way forward whenever I mailed asking for help. Thank you e-GMAT!!