Sharing my GMAT experience

Ynpprep - congratulations on scoring 700. As Skywalker18 requested, it would help others if add more details to your debrief especially things around your study schedule, the various stages of your preparation etc.

-Rajat

Hi congratulations on a great score. Could you please elaborate a little more on your experience with egmat. I am currently looking to improve my verbal score and would appreciate your help. Further could you share details on of all the mocks you took it would be very helpful. Thanks

Thank you!

1. On the specifics of e-GMAT,
When I was looking out for study course, what caught my attention was e-GMAT's proposition of "verbal for non-natives". I understand my native language even when I am half attentive and know almost immediately what message / meaning/ inference is conveyed or if someone has made any mistake in verb or pronoun or if the sentence does not convey correct meaning. But I need to pay lot more attention with other languages, including English. This decreases my speed of reading, and increases time to find errors, or to understand the inferences. And to add further, Verbal is the obviously last section of this marathon which does not help. When I gave the first mock test, I could see that all this left me short on time.

There are so many courses and all courses probably teach same content. I enrolled into e-GMAT to get the perspective from the course which projects itself as "for non-natives". I liked the structured approach of e-GMAT and enjoyed their question bank. Their harder SC and CR questions felt lengthy and harder passages felt uninteresting to me. It started to feel as though I am taking the training to climb Everest to participate in triathlon. Initially, I was very frustrated, but then I slowly started thinking that may be, that is the whole idea. In the end, all that mattered was if I improved in my ability.

2. On the specifics on mock tests,
I also took Veritas Prep course ( I might review this course on separate topic ) and I used its mock tests. My first test was 590 but that was without any study. After reading course contents and basic brush up from both the courses + Barrons guide, I was rolling around 670 for some time. With more deep dives and after solving most of the questions, I became consistent around 700.

I tried to take the mock test every alternate weekend and only to check which area I should invest time. Between 590 to 670, I tried to improve the accuracy in all sections and cover all PS. Between 670 - 700, I tried to improve speed, especially in RC and SC, and fine tune DS.

3. On the specifics on study schedule,
I travel a lot on the job, so really could not follow much time schedule. I think, what happens while studying for GMAT is - the better you get at solving problems, the harder the problems become. So I defined a goal post for me and worked towards it. For the first two months, I used to carry atleast one book and study whenever I could squeeze some time and spend atleast an hour during evening. After two months, I started devoting atleast 2-3 hours. During last month of study, I mostly revised and solved Official guide and GMATPrep.

All the best!

Ynpprep - the above is great advice. Based on my debriefing interviews with students, I have discovered that having a very specific goal with regards how many hours you will study and when is essential to consistent progress towards your goal. Now some people can carve out a neat time slot in their day while others need to study twice or thrice a day to achieve the same benefit. Regardless of what your do, make sure that you are consistent. It is a lot better to study 90 minutes every day for 5 days a week than to study 4 hours per day twice a week.

-Rajat