Who am I?
I am a non-native English speaker with an engineering background. When I started my GMAT preparation, I was sure that I would not take any coaching class and learn through self-preparation. As is the case with most other engineering students, I had a strong hand on quant, but I lacked the necessary verbal skills tested on the exam. For me, those 75 minutes of the Verbal section were the real deal. Therefore in the context of the review, I am just going to talk about how I dealt with this specific section. I had an average GPA in college. Therefore, I really wanted a stellar GMAT score to offset my undergrad GPA.

How did I prepare for my first GMAT?
For the entire verbal section (SC, CR and RC), I used Manhattan strategy guides to learn the concepts tested. In fact, I read some of these strategy guides twice to really absorb the content and learn its application. I then practiced all the problems in the OG. Honestly, I was not at all confident with my preparation a week before my exam. In my official mocks, I scored in the range of 690 – 720, with a consistent score of Q50 in math and highly varying score (V31 – V37) in verbal.
On the actual exam day in June 2015, I scored a total score of 700 (Q50 V34, IR8, AWA 5.5). I was highly disappointed in myself as I personally believed that I could have done a lot better. I decided to take some time off and focus on my work.

What did I learn from my first GMAT?
I realized that I was very poor on time management throughout the verbal section. In some way or the other, I was always short of time, adding more stress on myself. Upon brainstorming, I realized that the reasons for poor time management were – stamina issues by the end of the exam, a poor foundation of concepts on tougher problems of GMAT, and added stress that was in a circular loop with my poor time management.

What did I decide to do after my first GMAT?
Three things –
1. Have a strong foundation of the concepts tested on GMAT
2. Have good time management on different sections
3. Have no surprises during the test – essentially minimize the stress that builds up during the exam

How did I prepare for my second GMAT?
After realizing the two broad focus areas of my preparation, I decided to purchase the sentence correction module of e-GMAT and Powerscore CR Bible. I spoke to a lot of folks who had been in the same situation as the one I was in, and most of them recommended these two books. I didn’t pursue anything for RC as I had a strong reason for that. My new strategy was to become extremely accurate and quick in sentence correction as out of the three, it has the least amount of gray area. With added time at hand, I could then devote a good chunk of my time in both RC and CR.
e-GMAT’s course is very nicely tailored to help almost anyone understand the basic concepts of grammar. I would highly recommend it to folks who have tirelessly put significant effort in their verbal preparation and still see little returns. With this newly found strong foundation in sentence correction, I then read through posts of Ron Purewal on Manhattan forum. This helped me train my ear on what the GMAT prefers. Over time, I started loving sentence correction problems. My accuracy went from somewhere around 60% to almost 90%. You would wonder how doing extremely well on one section is good enough to achieve a stellar score. Well, allow me to break the myth here. I was able to tackle CR and RC problems a lot more comfortably as I was never really short on time. So essentially, my first goal (have a strong foundation of concepts) helped me achieve my second goal (have good time management). Before the exam, I took four days off from work to get up to speed. In this last one week, I achieved my third goal, which was that there should be no surprises. I took official mocks every single day starting from Saturday and scored the following in CAT 3, 4, 5 and 6: 770, 760, 750, 760 (in the same order). Although CAT 3 and 4 were repeat tests, CAT 5 and 6 were not. This made me confident that I can score well and that all I need to do is achieve my three goals that didn’t go very well for my first exam.
On the actual exam day (Thursday, October 20, 2016), I got up at 11 AM and watched an episode of South Park while having lunch, a habit that I repeated for all my mocks. I went to the test center with an extremely calm head. In AWA, I was left with 6 minutes at hand after I wrote an essay that I was happy with. In IR, I was again left with 7 minutes when I was on the last question (got 11/12 correct). Again in Quant, I finished the paper 11 minutes earlier. In Verbal, I was always a minute or two ahead of time and that helped me take care of the stress I used to face. I was able to answer all the sentence correction questions very comfortably and quickly. As I had some good amount of time saved from SC section, I spent that time on CR and RC to really be sure that I am marking the right answer. Everything was going well and very consistent with my experience from mocks. And well, the results were very consistent too – I scored a 760 (Q50 V41, IR 8, AWA 5.5)!

Thanks to e-GMAT for helping me get past the barriers that I faced in my first GMAT!

Cheers,
Tariq

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I started my GMAT Prep in November 2015. It went on and off for about 6 months. I had been going through OG books without any basics and understood the simple fact that I was going nowhere. I received an email from GmatClub about e-gmat and I registered with it to avail the free tutorials. I really liked the tutorials that I watched. They had basics, relevant examples and indian accent( which helped me comprehend better). After that I checked the course's reviews and they seemed one of the best. Along with it, the cost was one of the lowest and they were providing free access to gmatclub tests and 800score.com. So, with all these reasons I chose e-gmat verbal online course.

The course is very well structured and examples are provided where ever necessary. After each portion there are questions to practice. I really liked the scholaranium portion of the course. The scholaranium quiz gives real time test like experience with all varieties of questions and you can customize the quiz.

The doubts were cleared almost within a day on the questions on the e-gmat site. And the best thing was they extended my access to an extra month when it was about to get over. Although I have never got response from e-gmat moderators on question discussions on gmatclub.

Overall, I think it is a good and basics verbal course for non-natives.

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The course discusses the fundamentals in detail in its video lesson. Verbal Scholaranium is structured in a very easy and intuitive for first time registered users. A Great source of verbal questions. Practice exercises are a diamond mine with a very detailed explanations to correct your mistakes.

I have improved scores from Q22-27 range to Q35-Q38 in my practice tests. I have my Test coming up in a month and i am sure that i can reach my target score of Q38-42 with the help of e-GMAT verbal.

I am Very Satisfied with the course and recommend it to all non-native English speakers.

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1. Content - The course content for Verbal Online if the best I have seen. The virtual lectures are so well prepared that they give the feel of a real lecture.

2. Support - The team is very supportive in reverting to queries. All queries are reverted within 2 days with a detailed dissection of the question and the approach to answer it.

3. The practice quizzes before and after the lectures help well in identifying scopes for improvement.

4. The best part of Verbal Online was the Sentence Correction. The SC content helped me hone my skills greatly. I could move from 8-9 mistakes during mocks in SC to barely 1-2 in the final mock.

5. The course gives ample opportunity to practice the lessons learnt.

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The e-gmat Verbal Live Prep is a very good platform for GMAT takers. It gives an opportunity to learn concepts and practice questions in a step-wise manner.SC course is extraordinary! The explanations of every single OG question is detailed and help students see clearly why each answer choice is right or wrong.There are plenty of practice questions of various difficulty levels.CR and RC courses are also very good.The pre thinking approach in CR is great. How to eliminate a wrong option is what you will learn at e-gmat. Overall a great service. Worth (every penny) trying it!

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This course is hands down the best quant prep course out there. It has a mix of types of learning which include pre-lesson work to get an idea of where you stand with the understanding of the material, the lesson itself to go through the concepts and then a post-lesson quiz to test how well you were able to grasp the content.

Additionally, there are live instructor led lessons every weekend which cover a topic in detail going through examples, common mistakes and how the GMAT tests these concepts. I found these to be especially useful as most of those sessions had 6-10 people max and so I was able to get dedicated attention and have all my doubts and questions answered.

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This course is very beneficial for those who have demanding work schedules and cannot dedicate large chunks of time to studying for the GMAT. The course is broken into smaller 20-30 mins video guides followed by practice questions to help shore up your understanding. There is a syllabus provided at the beginning of the course so if you have specific areas of concern you want to focus on, you can go directly there.

What I found most useful about the course was the ability to tackle a section and then do targeted practice on those topics so I could make sure I understood them before moving on. Additionally, the ability to re-watch the lessons as many times as necessary was very helpful.

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Well I took my 1st Gmat on 13th of Sept'16, after studying for almost 3 months, had gone through OG's and VR's 15 and 16 3-4times for this attempt and in my practice tests i was scoring 620-640. But on the test day I scored 590 V23, Q48, IR2 and AWA6. I was quite depressed as I was quite good in academics throughout. Then I read reviews of people who had scored well on Gmat and many of them vouched for Egmat.
After going through Egmat Verbal online, i felt quite confident, as everyone says and i repeat, the SC does take time when you start, but after 2-3 weeks when you are comfortable with the 3 step approach it feels good. Additionally, if the SC is done thoroughly, the approach helps quite much in RC. When i appeared for the first time i skipped one RC and then also I was not able to complete all questions on time. But after going through the course i completed Verbal section 2 mins before time.
So here is what i gained, read carefully and calmly. And when going through the SC after finishing the course, do the OG's and VR's twice over just to understand the approach. Once SC is complete the RC automatically improves. And for CR practice a lot. Do complete the scholaranium and do not forget to check the comments of other students.
The quant tests and verbal tests that we get along with verbal online are quite helpful.

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I have been using the verbal live prep and it has been the best live prep course that i have ever studied and it has improved my verbal skills a lot .I learned though the course makes SC seem more easier task to handle, and the important thing is their approach gives me confidence to tackle SC, I just go step by step in a structured many get to the correct answer choice. My accuracy now is >80%, I'm quite happy. If I want to boost my accuracy to about 90%, I'd know where to focus my time, thanks to their Scholarinium, a great tool to know where your strengths, your weaknesses, your takt time (you should definitely see their free strategy recording on this term). So you'll know you can confidently skips some questions and still get a high score.

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I had score 540 on my GMAT by self study but I wasn't sure if I will be able to improve further by self study. So I took up eGMAT Quant Live course and I got 20 point jump in Verbal in my score in a matter of 28 days. I wish I had taken the course earlier. If I had, I would have scored more than 700 easily.
I would recommend this Quant course to each and everyone who is struggling to score well on the GMAT just because his/her Quant is weak. e-GMAT Quant Live course helped me a lot as I could take it on my own pace as I could get the recording of each and every session.

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