HAVE NOT HAD FULL ACCESS TO E-GMAT AFTER PURCHASING

Dear Rajat,
I purchased my course on OCT 25th 2014.I dint get access to scholarium till yesterday.I still dnt know where your discussion forum exists.Why the site can not be made more integrated and easily user understandable.The links keep going down randomly.
Please do not mind ,Your site looks so amateur that I had to google search how to find if any forum discussion or forum post option exists.
and got this link..But this link took me to a blank page : /blogs/how-to-edit-your-post-in-e-gmat-forum/

ManhattanGMAT looks so easier to access. I am a software engineer and I am finding it difficult to access the menus and features of your online course. Still I have no clue if you have any forum discussion site where students can discuss and mentors give feedbacks like in Manhattan or GMATclub.
Secondly Scholarium link keeps disconnecting every now and then.Moreover to manage traffic you have done one very sad thing in your site.ie if I am reading somethign for say 15 minute and then click next question ,It asks to log in again
You have good contents; if you improve the User Interface to a friendlier and managed form ,egmat will rock.

Dear Fearose,

Thank you for your email. I am sorry to hear that you are facing issues. Let me address a few issues right away:

Scholaranium: You mentioned that you purchased Verbal Online in October 2014, while Scholaranium was launched on Jan 31 2015. We offered Scholaranium as a free upgrade to our existing customers. Prior to as well as after launch, we did send three emails asking our customers to request access to Scholaranium. Had you requested access then, you would have received instructions + a list of help videos on how to use Scholaranium. Also, had you purchased after Jan 31, you would have received access automatically.

Internal Forums + How to navigate the site: You get help videos on how to navigate the site - with your purchase receipt. These help videos illustrate pretty much everything. In addition, we have dedicated support teams who support you even on weekends. Had you written to support (at) e(dash)gmat.com, you would have received a response by now.

I completely agree that the site design is different from many other educational sites - you mentioned Manhattan; I would say even Veritas.. and there are good reasons for that. Here are a few below:

Organization of Content


Manhattan and Veritas
If you look at their online courses - they require you to read their books for foundational and core conceptual learnings, do the online lessons (which we call eLearning) for revision, and attend the Live Sessions after that. And then if you want to post a doubt - you go to their forums and post the same. A majority of their online portal is designed around Live Sessions. (their portals are organized by dates for live sessions) Why is that? My guess is that majority of their students purchase their Live Courses rather than self paced learning courses (my guess is based on the fact that On demand courses comprise of fewer than 10% of overall reviews for both companies).

e-GMAT

At e-GMAT, 65% of our students just purchase "On demand" courses and are very happy with them. Secondly, the foundation, conceptual, and application based learning all take place within our courses (no more reading books). For example the Sentence Correction course contains everything that you need to ace GMAT SC (including a very healthy dose of practice questions). Also, the number of hours of eLearning that our Sentence Correction course provides is probably 5-7 times that Veritas or Manhattan provide.

Secondly, we are of the firm belief that when you are learning one topic, you focus all your attention on that topic. The incredible success of our students proves that such is the case. Hence, the organization of our courses is by subject matter (separate SC, CR, RC courses) rather than by classes.

Lastly, we have a dedicated forum for every concept. Why - because if you have a doubt while learning a concept, we do not want you to search in a random forum whether this doubt has been responded to. You just need to go to the dedicated forum and look for it. Most of our students tell us that because of this forum architecture, 90% of their doubts are addressed right away just by looking at the responses to older posts. Now the forum button is not in your face, but its right next to the launch button. Again, had you emailed a subject matter query to any of our email addresses, our support team would have sent you a help video as to how to post your doubt.

Now since you are an IT guy, you probably understand that implementing 100+ internal forums, building tracking mechanisms to ensure that each of the doubts posted in these forums reach the SMEs and ensuring that the SMEs respond within the SLA is much more complex than simply implementing a forum and asking everyone to post there. However, we chose to do the same since this keeps things organized and easier for our students in the long run.

The organization of our courses is different because a lot of our decisions are governed by Learning Pedagogy we follow (after all that has a much bigger impact your end GMAT score than the User Interface) and the enhancement processes we have within the company. For example - you may find that our videos take a bit longer to load than the videos from Manhattan or Veritas. Why is that - its because we track every single click within the video and every single exercise question that you solve within the video.

We use this date to enhance the the overall offering; for example, if we find that if a majority of students are revising a slide multiple times, or if a majority is getting a particular post assessment question wrong then we either enhance the concept or add additional content. Our in depth series in As Vs. Like is an example of such an exercise. We do this even though this adds 500K records to our database every day. I don't believe many test prep companies engage in such an exercise.

Can the user interface be made more friendly - yes it can be, and we will work on the same in a few months.

.

I do agree that we have a timeout mechanism built in. We log you out if you are not using the system for 25 minutes. This in principle is the right thing to do since if you are disengaged from learning for long time, then you should log in again and restart your learning. But its not done to manage traffic. Our CTO did security for a bank as well as for a trading floor and this is one thing that I cannot get him to change. This (his security background) is the reason why almost everything on e-GMAT is https where as many test prep organizations (including GMAT Club and Veritas Prep) work on pure http.

Bottom line - our courses are structured differently than anything out there because of conscious decisions that are based either on learning pedagogy or on security. While these decisions may lead to a slight learning curve while using the site, the benefits outweigh the inconvenience. In addition, we provide excellent support (90%+ questions are answered within 24 hours) so do write to us is you have any questions/concerns.

Lastly, I would be very happy to take any feedback that you to improve the user experience. Write to me and I would be happy to set up a call.

Regards,

Rajat Sadana

Dear Rajat Thank you so much for your reply.
I still can not find where does the "Forum" exist in the site.
Kindly please paste the link to access the forum where I can see the questions of students and explanations on a particular topic .
It is great idea if you have segregated discussion topic wise. Otherwise It is very tough to consolidate ideas from various places in a forum and make notes.

Is forum and explanations can be accessed for unlimited time ?

" simply implementing a forum and asking everyone to post there. However, we chose to do the same since this keeps things organized and easier for our students in the long run."

I went to your site again..and tried to find out where does this simple one FORUM exists. May be I am very bad at searching.Kindly share if you mean FORUM and BLOGs same thing in your site?
I am unable to paste links here .GMATclub has some restrictions.

Also,it is very vogue which of your contents are unlimited and which are limited. Ok i can see that inside my info> purchase>Critical reasoning/SC/RC... but within these ,which section is for limited time? what about Blogs? is it accessible forever. The reason i am asking is not to complain you but to help myself and hopefully help your site to look more organized.You have great contents,I never said you are worse than any of your competitors.

If I goto Myinfo>forum posts> i cant see any button or link to post new items in forum!!

Moreover,If i click My resource as a user I though it will take me to the resources that I am allowed to access or buy. Top of the My resource page looks like that but If I scroll down I can see it has some videos explainign how to access x..y..z ,some blogs,some random discussions!!!
But Still FORUMS I cant see I feel sorry on myself..I just did a google search putting the keywords "e-gmat forum" please check the initial first 2 results. It takes you to blank pages within e-gmat blogs !!!

Dear Fearose,
Please do not feel sorry. Simply send us an email at support at e-gmat dot com (support@e-gmat.com) and our customer success champions will gladly help you out.
Regards,
Rajat

Thanks Rajat,

Now I got to know where the "FORUM" exists in your site.
trust me ,I am not so idiot,still I could not figure out in last 5 months.
I was google searching to find where the forum exists.
Few things to improve your site's user interface,you can take it positively or completely discard it. Afterall it is your site

1. COntact-support-help id or number should be clearly visible on the top of the page when a user Logs in

2. Next to Launch button you did put a downward pointing arrow mark.The user interface looks like Downward arrow mark symbolizes the LAUNCH .Even when a user puts his mouse on the downward arrow button ,it does not show what it stands for.SO I assumed that it is same as LAUNCH. When I clicked that DOWNWARD Arrow mark today,I got to know where you have "hidden" FORUM in your site.just I have access till 28th april and I hope I can read and post as much as I can .It was complete wastage of money as I could never figure out.Only a google search pointed me to ask you question in this GMAT discussion.Had you created a clearly visible hyperlink button mentioning FORUM and SUMMARY just like your LAUNCH button , it would have been so easily accessible for all.Now you can come up with logic that everyone else knows where forum exists except me.I accept I might be among tiny 1% who could not figure out the same.I hope you can make it easier for those 1% of your customers in which I belong too .

Moreover the LAUNCH and downward arrow mark is visible as a single Blue button to users.If you could separate them with some Gap,then also user like me could have a hunch that they serve 2 different purposes.


3. When someone replies in forum,can you clearly demarcate whether the particular reply is from a student or a expert.You can use some color code or some stars to symbolize the same.I mean just scanning through multiple replies in a discussion chain user should be able to find the expert's reply.


I hope You take it positively.I have taken my time not to highlight your site's weakness but to give a feedback to improve it.

Is their any way that I can get extension of access to forums and discussion by one more month,given the reasons cited above?
my id is firozahmed.0056

Thanks

Dear Firoz,

Appreciate all the positive feedback. Wait for a couple of months and you will see that most of it will be incorporated. We will reach out to you. We have a new release of Scholaranium coming up. Would appreciate if you want to take a look and provide feedback. Please write to support for the same.

-Rajat

Dear Firoz,

Appreciate all the positive feedback. Wait for a couple of months and you will see that most of it will be incorporated. We will reach out to you. We have a new release of Scholaranium coming up. Would appreciate if you want to take a look and provide feedback. Please write to support for the same.

-Rajat

Hi Rajat,

I wanted to purchase the course today, but I don't know what is wrong with the page. The page does not load properly and it appears a message that says that "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage". Do you have some problem with the page??

Thank you,

bolasao - I don't believe we are facing any issues with Internet Explorer. We have received 20+ purchases in the last 12 hours. Moreover, I just tried the purchase loop using Internet Explorer 11.0.10240.16431 and it went through without any issue. Can you send a screenshot to support(at)e-gmat.com?

Regards,

Rajat Sadana

Hi Guys,

I purchased egmat's verbal online prep on July 29, 2015 and have been very happy with the content of egmat. Moreover, I also got 800score tests and gmat club tests access. However, I accessed the link to gmatclub tests which led me to a registration link its been a week but I have not any idea how can I access Gmatclub tests. Any help in this regard is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Every day i open up my GMAT it comes with 80 mails+. Beat THAT

Hi.
I have sent many emails to ask for help. scholarium is still bugging and i cannot go ahead after CR > Premise and conclusion concept 4.
Please again help urgently.

you should probably start a separate discussion for that topic. I am going to lock this one since it is old and not very relevant. I would suggest you be specific with issues and your request.

BB