GMAT Online experience

Thank you for sharing, Pinakin Patel, and congratulations on the high Quant score. I have no idea what it feels like to finish the section with ten minutes to spare. It seems reasonable that, with a little extra care, you could raise that to a 50 or 51. The Verbal section was not too great, by your own admission. I am curious to learn more about what you disliked about the IMS Verbal course. (I did not even know that IMS was a company based in India.) Why was it so bad? I press the issue because, without further information, it can appear as though you are using the course as a scapegoat for your performance. Did you take notes? Did you adhere to the methods taught? Were there assessments during the course that allowed you and your teacher(s) to gauge your progress? I simply do not know enough about the program to tell whether your experience was atypical.

In the next two and a half months, you will want to dedicate at least two of those months to making gains in Verbal, most likely across the board. If you decide to go for an e-course, get everything you can from it. Take notes, practice, review, and repeat the process. Set accuracy benchmarks for different types of questions (e.g., Medium), and see if you can reach them consistently when you work through practice sets. I know that some companies use in-house questions and provide the analytics for you through these sets, but there is near universal agreement among tutors and teachers of the test that nothing beats official material for Verbal preparation. Make use of official questions on a regular basis, even if you also supplement with questions by a third party. It is important to develop a sense of how official questions are phrased, as well as the type of logic that is tested. Many companies produce their own questions with good intentions, but sometimes these questions are not so tightly wound, and, in any case, they are not created by the same people who write the questions you will see on the exam.

Best of luck with your studies.

- Andrew