GMAT 685 (V85, Q83, DI84) with e-GMAT

The thing I am still a little surprised by is my V85, which put me in the 94th percentile. What makes that surprising is that verbal, and critical reasoning and reading comprehension in particular, was my weakest and most intimidating section for almost the whole time I was preparing. It was not that I did not know the question types. I just did not have a reliable way to actually approach them, and once I did, it turned into my strongest score.

The first thing the e-GMAT course did for me was stop me from wasting time. Before I studied a topic I would take the PACE quizzes, which are short quizzes you do before learning something, and based on how you do they tell you which lessons you can skip and which ones you actually need. Because I was preparing around a full-time job, that mattered a lot. By my own rough estimate it saved me somewhere over 45 hours in quant alone, which I could then put into the sections that actually needed it.
After that, the tools helped me figure out things I could not see on my own. The analytics let me read my performance right down to the individual concept, so instead of redoing all of algebra I could see it was specifically sequences and functions that were dragging me down. I would do an error log analysis to find what was breaking, go through the official-style questions with their step-by-step solutions to relearn a cleaner method, and then take a short cementing quiz to check the concept had actually held. That loop pulled my weak algebra blocks back up from around 40 percent to consistently strong.

Where the e-GMAT course really stood apart for me, though, was verbal. Learning to settle on what the answer should be before I even looked at the choices turned the bold-face questions that used to drop me to around 20 percent into near-automatic points, and the same habit carried straight into Data Insights. The reason it all held up on test day is honestly quite simple, which is that the practice questions are as hard as the real thing. My official practice mocks were actually flattering me by 50 to 60 points, so training on the harder set is what made the real exam feel like it was in range.

One honest thing I will say is that the practice questions and the mocks are genuinely hard and they will not go easy on you, but that is the point. If you have real fundamentals and verbal keeps letting you down the way it did for me, this is the one that will actually show you what to fix.