GMAT Club
September 05, 2012
santu71182

Joined: May 13, 2010

Posts: 33

Kudos: 16

Self-reported Score:
600 Q47 V26
710 Q49 V38

The perfect verbal dose for non-native speakers

REVIEWER IDENTITY VERIFIED by score report [?]

Improvement 110 Points

Course e-GMAT Online Focused

Location Online

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.

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