I gave my first attempt back in Sep 2009. I scored 610(Q43, V31). I did not expect such a low score then. I had prepared for over 6 months with utmost sincerity. Such was the disaster that I did not even bother to analyze what went wrong.

One of my friends, though, advised me to retake the test after due preparation and to take the test only when I see an improvement in my preparations. That proved to be very true.

Now by the start of this year, I decided to give my second attempt and do things differently. Though there was a gap of nearly two years, my force to ace GMAT was no less. As a BITSian I knew it wouldn’t be too hard to score 46-50 in Quant. But as a non-native I needed better preparation in Verbal. Like Quant, Verbal can be aced with proper fundamentals, understanding and strategic attack. Below I have shared a few things that probably helped me in achieving 700(Q48, V37).

Fundamentals:

You might have heard this over and over again. Be strong in your fundamentals. This applies to both Quant and Verbal. For Quant, we have tons of reliable resources in the web: MGMAT Quant Strategy Guides, Kaplan GMAT Math Workbook and GMATClub WorkBook topics to name a few. I too relied on these resources to understand the nuances of certain GMAT format questions such as Work-Rate problems, Probability and Statistics problems and Inequalities problems. These are not complicated when you know what to look out for. For instance, you have to be so clear about the reasoning behind the work-rate question ‘A works for 12 hours to finish a job, B works for 14 hours to finish the same job and what would be the time taken to complete the same job when A & B works together’ that you can understand a complex question with jargons.

Similarly for Data Sufficiency questions, you should improve your reasoning to a stage where you can connect the dots between the questions that you practiced (during practice tests, GC forum questions, etc.) and the questions that come up on the test day. Of course none of the questions that you faced during your preparations is going to pop-up on your test day. But the logic will.

Is Verbal an up-hill task?

Yes and No. Yes because we either think that there is no one procedure to get the exact correct answer or that process of elimination is the ONLY way to get the ‘best’ answer. I strongly disagree here. There is a way to get to the exact answer (note not the best answer). That’s because GMAT has a pattern in framing the logic behind its questions. Note I said logic not the structure. Most of the resources out there teach you the structure of the GMAT questions: how to use advanced negation technique in an assumption-type CR questions or how to memorize the usual idioms or how to quickly read a four paragraph RC question. Believe me. This doesn’t work.

I said no because I used the e-GMAT Verbal Live product which showed me these logical procedures to answer the Verbal questions. I have to say here that I’m not part of the marketing team from e-GMAT. I am genuinely ‘just’ a customer of e-GMAT. I got to know them only through GMATClub.

Coming back to the logics, here are my thoughts for Verbal Question types:

Sentence Correction:
The GMAT SC questions from the Official Guide teach us certain important patterns. These patterns include but not limited to misplaced modifiers, logical parallel lists and many more. These cannot be answered in a mechanized manner. Because the answers might be grammatically correct but logically wrong. Only when the intended meaning of the sentence is clear, you can get to the correct answer. Again the OG teaches to eliminate the wrong choices because of very specific reasons. When this line of reasoning becomes intuitive the process of elimination becomes more logical and you get the ‘correct’ answer.

Critical Reasoning:
I learnt to better eliminate the incorrect answer choices through e-GMAT’s CR Course. I religiously followed the pre-thinking process as taught and improved in my timing to answer CR questions. Again here efficient elimination techniques come handy because GMAT throws in errors in a certain way which can be identified after thorough practice.

Reading Comprehension:
Though there is no one way to master this question type, the only proven way is to logically attack each RC question type. For that you need razor-sharp focus while reading the passage. When you focus on the structure and tone of the passage, the main crux will become evident. Per e-GMAT process, the passage summaries at various stages of reading the passage prove enough to answer the questions correctly. This helped me a lot as I was always struggling with RC.

On the Test Day:
Have fun! I mean, relax and look forward to enjoy the process. I tried to smile at various points to ease myself and to not think about what happened in the previous question. Of course this is not easy unless you practice it during the practice tests. I recommend taking MGMAT practice tests and review the questions to understand the source of errors. GMAT test will be lot easier after taking MGMAT tests. This might have a side-effect on you on the test day. That is, you might end up feeling that you screwed up the test. But actually you dint. That’s how I felt after each section. But I thought I ended up with a decent score. Thanks GMATClub, e-GMAT and MGMAT for helping me out in the process.

Read More

The E-GMAT course has revolutionised the way Verbal is taught. It's detailed yet simple slides on SC,CR and RC make learning complex concepts in verbal a breeze. Moreover compared to other standard text books, the course saves a student significant time by ensuring a student is exam ready for optimum performance.

The course has a quiz at the beginning and at the end of each topic to enable students to better assess their level of improvement .The Verbal Live Complete Lectures conducted by Rajat and Payal over the weekends focuses on the finer aspects of verbal that help improve one's score.

I am thankful to E-GMAT for playing an important role in my GMAT score and I expect E-GMAT to become the success story of all GMAT test takers in the years ahead.

Read More

E-gmat course really helped me improved my Verbal score drastically. In my first attempt I got a score of 580( Q 47 , V23 ) and I then started e-gmat score. I gave my GMAT on August 9th and got 660 ( Q47, V35) . I totally give e-gmat credit for this drastic verbal improvement.

Their Sentence correction and Critical reasoning stuff is really good and it breaks down all the complex topics into easy stuff. Also their live sessions on weekend were very helpful as they try to understand the concepts of a topic and help participants understand how to handle a question. I personally feel if u have a weak verbal and want to improve your score, then go for e-gmat.

Read More

I bumped into e-gmat (through some posts in GC) very late in my preparation cycle. I had only 1 month left for the actual GMAT and my verbal was stuck at 32-33 even after months of studying. I had completed MGMAT SC and improved my accuracy to 75% in SC but that was not sufficient. I realized that most of the times the main killer of my verbal score was RC. Sometimes I scored as pathetic as 25%. e-gmat was about to start the beta trial of their RC course and I thought there could be nothing better than trying this out. I had already tried other courses such as Kaplan, MGMAT for RC and found them a bit unsuitable for my style of study since I am not a voracious reader and hence always struggled to comprehend a long or unfamiliar passage.

Thus I went ahead and volunteered for the beta trial. The kick off session was interesting as Rajat mentioned about the pedagogy of the course and how it has been split into Concept files, Application files, Practice files. I found that quite interesting as it resembled the structure of some tutorial companies in India who conduct courses for Engineering and medical entrance exams. Belonging to a typical Engineering aspirant (common in India), I had already experienced this format and hence was comfortable in following the RC course of e-gmat.

I could see the improvement after the first week itself. RC passage was no longer scary to me and my accuracy started to improve. By the time of reaching last week before my actual test, I was confidently scoring 70-80% in RC and my verbal score in mock CATs ranged from 35-41. On the actual test I managed to score 38 in verbal and was really comfortable even in answering the last RC passage (by the time you reach there you are almost dry of energy and the anxiety to view the score dominates the senses).

Few interesting points I found about this course are:

1. Illustrative and well paced narration: The course flows smoothly and is divided into several sub topics such as: Reading Strategies, Main point, Inference, Detail Concept, and Structure Concept which eventually covers all kinds of questions possible in RC. So targeted focus on each area helps in understanding how to tackle all types of RC questions.

2. Audio Visual tutorial: As I mentioned already, I found reading through hundreds of pages on how to answer RC questions or how to read RC passage was not my cup of tea. Rather the audio visual aid used in e-gmat had a lasting impact on me till the test day and I was able to remember how should I tackle the RC passage and question.

3. Generating interest in the passage: The course focuses more on generating an interest on the topic of the passage by setting short goals of summarizing a small paragraph or few lines after you read through, predict what the author could write next etc. This helps in getting involved in the passage and no topic would appear dry afterwards.

4. Lots of practice material: I found e-gmat contains a decent number of practice passages from every walk of life (after OG 12 edition of course) and the passage analysis of each of these passages certainly wires the brain on how to read the passage in the actual test.

5. Short tutorials: All the files in this course was relatively short, lasting to a maximum of 20-30 minutes. This ensures you are not yawning midway and are able to follow what you are studying.

Since the course is still in its inception and will be released soon, I see more improvement coming into the course and thus would recommend the non-native and not voracious readers to gain most from this course, which makes reading a passage more fun than a struggle.

Read More

My struggle in the verbal section was clearly visible from my first GMAT score and subsequent practice tests. Many of the forum members kept on mentioning that SC is an area where improvement is quick and it can save a lot of time if you master tricks of solving SC questions. And I wondered how? If my SC basics are poor how am I going to achieve this? I sat for couple of months to build up my grammar basics by following Wren&Martin. But frankly speaking I was getting slow day by day in solving SC questions.

That's when I heard about e-gmat from gmat club members and signed up for a free SC course and OG solutions. Upon accessing the course I found that the approach was totally different. Here instead of identifying grammar bits and pieces, the emphasis was on to understand what the author is implying to say. Now that was something unusual for an Indian student. We are always taught to target the pain points and identify the faults. So my earlier approach was in line to my past experience. With the new methodology adopted by Mr. Sadana and his team, learning became fun. Instead of trying to apply all grammar rules, I practiced to peep into the author's mind and that straight away alerted me to where the problem lies in the sentence. With the long sentences it helped a lot since I saved more time in re-reading the entire sentence in the 5 answer choices.

The idea of application files and concept files is also equally innovative and helps grasp the crux of the SC approach easily. With the several practice sentences and their detailed analysis by the instructor, the mind automatically gets wired to dissect a SC question during practice and during test.
All this helped me in bringing down my timing from around 2 minutes to 80-90 secs. Just imagine 7 minutes of extra time in verbal section will do wonders for you in RC questions towards the end.

It not only helped me improve my SC accuracy but also gave me some additional time to spend on the last RC question. The result was evident. From a dismal score of 26 in Verbal I could improve to 38 in my final attempt. I am sure if I had taken this course a little bit earlier, I could have easily improved another 2-3 points. Since then I suggested some of my friends about this course and few of them registered for it as well. This appreciation from my friends led me to write this review with a view that it will help many more non-native speakers to get the right verbal coaching. You would soon hear from on of them who has recently scored a 42 in verbal. Now that's an impressive score for any non-native.

Read More

I learnt about e-GMAT on the Gmat Club, and enrolled myself around early Feb this year. I already had taken date for GMAT in April, and because of job commitments, I could not spend enough time for the preparation, but in the short span of 6-7 weeks, e-GMAT helped my conceptual understanding immensely.

From my first mock test (Gamtprep) @ 610 (Q-47, V-27), I improved by 4 points in verbal to get GMAT score of 640 with 31 in verbal (Q-48). While this was below my expectations, a good amount of credit for my improvement in verbal goes to E-Gmat, which helped me in firming the concepts as well as approach.

I am taking Gmat again next month and fairly confident of 700 score, as now I have actually ‘understood’ that how much difference the 'meaning' (in SC) and 'pre-thinking' (in CR) can make, something which I perhaps only ‘recognized’ at the first attempt. After learning the e-Gmat approach, when I am revisiting the OG explanations now, I am sure that there cannot be a better approach than that of e-Gmat, atleast for non-natives.

Will come back soon with a 700 scrore. Thanks e-Gmat and Rajat!

Read More

I recently gave my GMAT for the second time and scored 750 (Q50, V41) – 98th percentile!! I scored 610 (Q46, V27) in my first attempt. I have improved in quant and BIG TIME in verbal. I attribute the improvement in my verbal performance to my hard work, keeping the cool during the test and most importantly to the CORE SKILLS that I have learned through the e-GMAT verbal prep course.

Remember guys, in calculating the 200-800 score, GMAT assigns a higher weight to your verbal score than to your quant score – just open OG 12 and look at the percentile score difference between quant and verbal for the same numerical score. So, if you really want to boost your GMAT score to beyond 700, you need to make sure you do well on the verbal section. If you are a non-native English speaker like me, the chances are that you are missing some of the core skills needed to perform well in GMAT verbal, especially those related to sentence structure, identifying parts of the sentence and understanding the meaning of a complicated sentence. Developing these core skills makes the difference between scoring 30 versus scoring 40+ in verbal.

The first time around, I was getting a good score in verbal during my practice tests but the scores were not consistent. I would get 35 in verbal in one test and 30 in another – I could not really understand why. After the disappointing verbal score in my first GMAT, I decided to take a more fundamental approach to my verbal preparation and started looking for some course that catered to my needs. I read some reviews on e-GMAT and I wanted to give it a try because it was said to be designed specifically for non-native English speakers. After I listened to the free videos on their website, I was immediately very impressed. I signed-up for the verbal package right away and I think this one of the good decisions I made in my GMAT preparation. Their focus on building the core skills in non-native English speakers makes e-GMAT different from other test prep companies. After going through the basic, intermediate and advanced sentence correction sessions of the e-GMAT course, I was very convinced that they got it right! I religiously followed the e-GMAT three-step process in solving each of the sentence correction questions and I immediately started seeing results. I was able to breakdown complex sentences into smaller, more manageable parts and understand the intended meaning much better. This process not only helped me in sentence correction, but I started to notice that I was now able to do much better at CR and RC as well because I started to understand the meaning of complex and tortuous sentences.

Overall, I think e-GMAT course was a great return on investment. If you are non-native English speaker and are struggling with your verbal score, I recommend you to e-GMAT course – you will not regret it!

Read More

I had only 22 days to prepare when I signed up for E-gmat. I was retaking the GMAT after a failed attempt. My SC and RC section was pretty strong but I wasn’t able to take advantage of my strengths because some question types in CR sections were weak.

With e-gmat course I was able to focus on just the weak section. Support was prompt. I never had to wait for more than a day to get a reply to my questions. I really liked the material for several reasons. First there are short enough videos that you can go over them and quickly check your knowledge wherever you want.

If you have a busy job schedule this is a perfect course for you. It doesn’t matter if you are a native speaker or not. If you want to increase your verbal score at least by 4 points you should seriously consider this course. I found this to be the best impact course out there. If you are little strapped on money consider there Verbal online. I had 4 point increase in my verbal score.

Read More

I signed up for the sentence correction and critical reasoning sections. It cost $119 for both. I would recommend this course for a non-native speaker but if you are a native speaker of English then I would not recommend it.

E-GMAT can be useful because after each lesson there are quizzes to complete. The quizzes re-enforces the lessons. I am a native speaker and I thought the course would be useful but after using E-GMAT I purchased Aristotle Grail, which was more useful. I did not use the critical reasoning section because I used Powerscores Critical Reasoning book.

Strengths:

• Covers key areas in sentence correction for the GMAT
• Re-enforces the lesson with quizzes
• Can use at your own pace
• Different levels to complete before moving to next one

Weaknesses:

• Fairly new company
• Found too many errors with the software
• Probably more helpful for non-native speakers (not necessarily a weakness)

Read More

I give a majority of credit to E-gmat team for the leap in my verbal score - yes the verbal score jumped from 67%ile to 88%ile. I made multiple wrong choices in my GMAT journey but e-gmat was worth the money.

I had done exhaustive preparation for GMAT but knew that there were gaps. Even after going through the SC bible,MGMAT SC, I could not fill in those gaps. I took the exam and the fissures were exposed.I got 33 in Verbal.

When I restarted my prep I came across the e-gmat course. I tried it and I loved it. The course was different from it's competitors.
-The content was rich, well documented with examples.
-It had option of on demand and live classes unlike other courses.
-The course was delivered in audio-visual mode and was interactive.
- The course was divided in levels and the application files in conjunction with post quiz cemented the concepts beautifully.
- Lastly, it covered the nuances the other courses failed to cover such as Ing Modifier, As vs Like, Bold CR, etc.

To add to it Rajat was very helpful in pointing out some issues with my prep.

Overall, I would give E-gmat a rating of 11 out of 10. I hope that E-gmat keeps up its good work. Rajat, Payal and E-gmat team - E-gmat course is a job well done!

Read More