Effective tool

Initially I thought about preparing for the GMAT on my own. However, I found it difficult to design a plan given the many resources available. I opted for e-Gmat's course so I would have something structured and comprehensive.

At first, you create your own Personalized Study Plan, which is interesting because it gives an idea of how much time to spend on each section. However, if you decide to complete every lesson and every quiz available, like I did, the PSP will significantly underestimate the time needed. It took me about three months to go through the whole course, though for the first month I dedicated only 2-3 hours/day (later 6+ hours/day).

I didn't try any other course, but I would recommend e-GMAT. To be honest, I chose the service because it had good reviews, but mostly because of its attractive pricing. I'm happy with the value I got for the money invested.

The program is comprehensive and the lessons are short and to the point. Lessons are usually followed by quizzes, which are very helpful because, at the end of the day, GMAT's content is fairly easy, what you need is a lot of practice solving questions.

The team is also very responsive. Communication is done through email, but I'd usually get a response within a few hours.

On the negative side, at times I was annoyed by questions that had the wrong answer marked. I remember a couple of instances, with questions regarding Correlation, that some students had previously expressed concerns on the forum, and the tutors reiterated that the answers was correct (it wasn't). I suggested they ran the correlation on Excel, which clearly showed that the answer was wrong.

The problem with that is that after you spot a few errors, you start questioning every explanation that you don't immediately agree with. I ended up wasting a lot of time checking questions I got wrong and trying to figure out is the explanation made sense.

Additionally, I was disappointed with the mock exams offered. In every exam I scored way below my target score. When I switched to the official mocks, I scored way above my target in every occasion. This is mostly the reason why I'm giving the service 4 stars. Getting such low scores deeply affected my self-confidence and I even thought about giving up. As it turns out, e-GMAT's mocks had mostly questions that took way longer than two minutes to solve. For example, in one of the mocks I scored 615, while on the official mocks I was scoring 685-725 (my actual score was 685 unfortunately).

In summary, I believe the service is good and would recommend it. Just keep in mind that the official mocks are a much better reflection of your potential score.