E-Gmat refund after 4 days - strange request from their team

Account sharing = two people sharing the same account. You can use your account from 5 different places and we can track and determine whether it's you or someone else. Many of our students travel so change of IP address is quite common. That alone does not constitute a red flag. Identity management is a very interesting and complex field. If it were just tracking IP address change, we would have automated the same long ago. Trust me, this has nothing to do with your travel.

Also remember this clause is for the case when people seek a refund with the intent to use someone else's account. 90% of the students are very true to us. However, a vast majority of those who do, do it though this route and hence the clause.

Bottom line - we like to keep things simple for you and for us. You want a refund and you are getting one ASAP. We don't bother you with the details of transactions fees, sales taxes etc. We eat that up. At the same time, we like to protect our IP and ask you to reciprocate accordingly.

Regards,

Rajat Sadana

Cheers for your elaborate responses. What I meant was, why don't you include this as a clause when I sign up for the course instead of telling me about it when I'm asking for a refund? It caught me by surprise and felt like an accusation to be honest. Otherwise I find your customer support to be brilliant.

Dear Alessandro,

I will be very frank with you. I don't like sending the disclaimer that saw. No one would. However, the manner in which I have seen our courses being abused has forced me to institute this disclaimer. This practice went so out of hand that our prospective students (prospective/not current) wrote to us asking us to do something about it.

Most of our customers are very true and honest with us. This is the reason that we have more reviews and success stories than any other test prep company does on GMAT Club. 99+% of our customers love our courses don't return our courses. Hence, it does not make sense for us to expose them to the same message. For example, we have had 1500 customers for our Quant course since August 2014 and only 8 have chosen to withdraw like you did. It would not make sense for me to send over this disclaimer/message to all 1500. The eight on the other hand should not have a problem signing the same since they are consciously choosing to withdraw.

Bottom line - I want to spend my time building products and helping you succeed. Building products takes a lot of time and effort. Scholaranium is a prime example. This is a product that is built from scratch both from a content and technology prospective. We launched this product in January and are already in the third iteration (iteration == enhancement) of the same. Similarly, we have added over 250 Quant Audio Visual solutions this year, and when we say audio visual, its beautifully done AV with a consistent methodical approach behind each and every solution, and not someone writing on a powerpoint slide by hand.

We have already seen the results of such enhancements. We have had 350+ reviews this year in the last 6 months - many more than any other test prep company has and more than what we had in 2013 and 2014 combined. In addition, we have already had more success this year than we had last year. Why - because on the Verbal front Scholaranium has enabled students to prepare more efficiently and realize their mistakes early on in the prep process. Its become such an important too that our students are demanding a Quant Scholaranium over OG solutions and plain vanilla practice questions .. and we are building one and when its done it will be available free of charge to all Quant Online and Live students just like the Verbal tool has been.

At the same time, I have a duty to protect these investments and hence the minor inconvenience. You know we could be investing our time and money on building a product for GRE since our GMAT courses are very already popular. Most of our competitors do that but we don't yet because we know that we can make our courses even better on the GMAT. If we are so committed to your success then is it too much to ask to sign a small disclaimer to help us protect our IP?

Regards,

Rajat Sadana

Rajat, you're raising valid points. I never stated that you shouldn't include the disclaimer. I am stating that it felt like an 'attack' (in lack of a better word) as soon as I asked for a refund. Especially since I an a Verbal customer who has kept his subscription without any offences. I guess this can be argued back and forth with you simultaneously providing me with well written commercial messages in between!

I am a little bit curious. Is E-gmat authorised to store credit card details for future "charges" for breaches to the disclaimer or how are you pursuing these criminals?

To conclude, I'm not trying to feed the fire or start an argument, I'm happy with you processing my refund (as you may have seen I have forwarded you the email with the disclaimer) and am still a happy verbal customer as well as an e-gmat customer support fan.

Dear Alessandro,

We don't store your credit cards. In fact, we don't even see your credit card information. In the rare case, that some student does send us his/her credit card information in email, we make it a point to permanently delete the same within the hour. Holding on to your credit cards is a liability that I don't want to take on, even though our system is super secure. In fact, all our pages have always been https rather than http (s for secure or encrypted). Only Manhattan does the same. Why do we have this - because our CTO has a background in security for banks and he would not have it any other way.

Remember the clause does not say that we will charge your credit card automatically. Its purely an agreement on your part to pay provided we can prove foul play.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Rajat Sadana

In my opinion E-gmat's Quant is really bad. I will not touch it ever. I tried it for a day. Realised it's not worth it. I will not suggest it to someone who seriously wants to score good marks in Quant. Having said that Kaplan Quant is equally bad and some of their explanations defy common sense and go roundabout to make simple concepts unnecessarily tough. If one really wants to do good in Quant Manhattan and Veritas are the only resources to understand the concepts and problems from official guides must be done diligently to check and reconfirm ones understanding of all relevant mathematical concept.

About E-gmat Verbal, I am all in for their RC techniques. Then again I would suggest not to miss Manhattan Verbal collection (except their CR which is worst in the market) and also not to miss Veritas Verbal collection, along with RC99 and Aristotle SC. CR is best explained by Powerscore GMAT CR bible and Powerscore LSAT logical reasoning bible. Powerscore SC is equally good.
Frankly speaking I am not a big fan of E-gmat having tried their free questions, free webinars and mock tests.

Even i tried egmat for a few days, I feel their quant is not that great. I heard eGMAT's verbal is very good. I took subscription of empower GMAT and i really liked the Quant sessions there and tricks/approach provided by Rich are fantastic, especially the TEST IT strategy he covers in the first 2 sessions. I am loving the quant sessions there. I would definitely recommend Empower GMAT Quant course a try.