I would like to share my experience so far with the study curriculum of e-GMAT. I believe my review will be most helpful for non- natives. I am from India a B. Tech and MBA from NMIMS, Mumbai (MBA aspirants from India would know). I have around 4.5 years of post graduate work experience and generally work 60-70 hours a week. I am a FRM holder and CFA Level 3 candidate and have academically done well throughout. I am a credit analyst and frequently required to write reports and do number crunching. Thus, I was a bit overconfident and never thought taming GMAT would be difficult. GMAT humbled me, showed me I was wrong.
1st Attempt (January 7, 2013) (570, Q47, V22): Disaster - I was applying for Autumn 2013 intake for two specific courses, however, as the average work experience of the class was around 7 years I was asked to apply after a minimum of 5 years work experience plus for Autumn 2014 intake. Though I knew this was not my final attempt, since I had already registered for the exam I tried to give it a shot. The resource material used was Manhattan entire strategy guides, and OG. Quant PS was quite easy for FDP, Geometry, word problems and algebra. DS was a bit tricky for number properties.
Sentence correction: Too different from how we are taught English in our schools. We can frame our own sentences which we know are correct and carry with flow. However, when subjected to sentences with different structure finding the correct answer was tricky. I read the Manhattan SC book twice and tried to memorize all the idioms. Though I understood the rules, their application was far far away. Whenever subjected to a complex sentence I would read the entire sentence and was unable to find anything wrong with it. I would read the answer choices, look for splits, madly try to look for parallelism and many other mistakes. Accuracy suffered and timing was poor.
Critical Reasoning: I was okay with the CR from the beginning. The guides helped identifying the types of problems etc. Timing was decent except the only few where I was stuck between 2 choices and had to re-read the question and the choices.
Reading Comprehension: Tough! Solving the problems in time was impossible. I took around 15 mins to solve 4 questions. The guide said make notes, read the 1st para/sentence twice. I followed everything but, still, accuracy was poor and time consumed was highest.
Interactive reasoning: The guide had just a glimpse of what the problems will be like. Not too many problems to solve. I did not know even just before taking the exam that for each individual question you have to answer the sub questions correctly or else you will not be awarded a point for that question.
Exam experience: I did not touch quants or solve any problems for at least 1 to 1.5 months before the exam. I only wanted to focus on verbal and my timing. The argument essay was okay. IR managing time was tricky. Quants though wasted time on few DS questions but still solved all the questions with 3 mins to spare. Took my break. Verbal I had heard the first 10-15 questions are very important, they will decide your overall score. I spent the initial 45- 50 mins with the first 20 questions and from there the disaster was waiting to happen. I submitted the answers to the last few questions even without seeing them.
I was shattered, even with this low level preparation I had expected a score of 640 plus so that I could improve to a 700 plus score in my final attempt. Then at the end of FY13 I started looking for study options. I had long working hours, so classroom programs were not for me. While exploring across GMAT Club I came across the e-GMAT program. I attended one of the free session on SC and strategy and I liked the course at once. I registered for the Verbal live prep program.
Here is the difference that e-GMAT brought to my study program.
Sentence Correction: It is a remarkably well-designed course. I moved finding splits and what sounded correct to finding the errors and looking for meaning. My problem-solving approach has changed in all aspects, now breaking the sentences into clauses and the subsequently looking for errors such as subject verb disagreement, verb, pronouns, structure, modifiers and idioms errors. The structure was set and timing has improved with practice. The applications files and online classes were eye openers, how the concepts were applied to each and every question. I realized at times the split was irrelevant and the sentence had other errors that made it incorrect. While in my prior approach, I used to select the answer choices based on the split. The concept files are amazing and helped in my daily work as well.
Critical Reasoning: The course has been great in improving my accuracy. It gave me tools which can be applied with precision. The new concepts were ABC test for finding the conclusion in case of confusion. I learned a better application of negation test, variance analysis which helped me in assumptions and evaluate type questions. And pre-thinking has become a part of solving the problem. Though I just have one pre- thought answer to question before seeing the options, the process made choosing the final answer easier.
Reading Comprehension: I have tried to internalize the RC passages using the RC strategies. Humanities passages don’t haunt me anymore. Still I need to improve on my timing and accuracy.
Interactive Reasoning: I haven’t seen so much material on IR on any forum. All type of probable questions from graphs, 2 part quants, table, verbal, MSR etc. Though the question on standalone basis are not tough but been familiar with the structure has its own rewards.
Presently, I am almost a month out from taking the GMAT exam, still I believe that e-GMAT course has already made a big difference in my performance in my verbal scores. On my Manhattan mock tests I am able to complete the verbal and IR portion on time. Accuracy has improved and my raw score is hovering around 34- 35. I am trying to improve the same in the range of 37- 40 in my final month.
Wish me luck for my GMAT exam next month. The best part of the course is that it teaches you a new way to look at the problems and helps you to internalize the process and apply it across all questions. I hope my review will be helpful to non natives.

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After getting a 660 (Q50, V29) in Nov 2011 (It was all self-preparation, solving only the OG and taking the practice tests from MGMAT. I also bought the MGMAT SC book), I decided to make it 700+ and apply for Fall 2014 (Due to pressure in my job and some other issues, I had to skip my plan to apply for Fall 2012 and Fall 2013)
In Oct 2012, when I resumed my GMAT preparation, I started searching for a comprehensive course for Verbal, which could boost my score. I came across e-GMAT, and after going through the trial videos, I got impressed and decided to enroll for Verbal Online.
I started the course, and then realized that I should have enrolled a long time back. It gave me a very solid framework, based on which I can look for patterns in the GMAT verbal questions. All its rules and the method of teaching impressed me a lot. Especially the RC pack helped me the maximum.
Then I thought to upgrade my account to Verbal Live-Prep. To me the SC and RC sessions helped a lot. All credit goes to Shraddha! She is an excellent teacher. Somehow the CR sessions were not that impressive to me. I know Shraddha could have done a better job if she could have taken those as well.

Pros :
1. Great course for non-natives. It makes all the concepts needed for GMAT crystal clear. Worth Buying.
2. The audio- visuals are more effective than buying books such as MGMAT SC


Cons :

1. Offline support of the team is very weak. If you send an email to them for help, there is no guarantee that someone will respond. After you change the subject of emails, I used to get reply that my email had reached their junk folder, and hence I had to send reminders for reply
2. All the faculties (except Shraddha and Payal) are not that friendly,predictable and to some extent, may be professional. I remember that initially one of the faculties was very friendly and was really helping me a lot related to my doubts. But one fine day he JUST STOPPED responding to my emails (Please note that in those emails I was just asking for help. No fight. No abuse.) I sent repeated reminders but it seemed as if he simply started ignoring my emails. Am still to figure out what exactly went wrong. After all, I paid for the service. Also, this behavior looked a bit unprofessional and unpredictable to me.
3. I ended up getting a 690 (Q49, V34). I still believe that as per my preparation with e-GMAT, I could have easily cracked 720+. What I think pulled my scores down was my test taking strategies. e-GMAT still don’t have its own practice tests. May be they should add that. Grockit might not be that helpful to people.


But in conclusion, despite whatever experience I had, I would still recommend the non-natives to buy at least the Verbal Online course. It simply is too good to make up your foundation for GMAT verbal.

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I Started the preparations in mid May 2013 and completed OG in 2 weeks. I was mighty impressed with CR as the questions were not only good but also interesting, with every question giving a beautiful insight on its own. Quant was easy and verbal was selectively good (around 80% of the time). I bought an e-GMAT verbal live prep course in the last week of May.

While I was scanning for more information about GMAT on GMATClub forums in the months of April, I came across e-GMAT. I subscribed to one of their posts and this led me to accept the invitation for one of their free sessions. Since I couldn’t join the session I was pleasantly surprised to get a recording of their session the very next day. I went through the recording at my own ease and thought of joining e-GMAT. The reason why I ultimately chose e-GMAT over other courses was their relatively lower price and their innovative promotion as being the best course for non-natives.

The content is good and neatly organized. They are truly the messiahs for SC. The sessions with Shradha and Payal are just too good. And the best part - shoot a doubt and you get responded in less than 24 hours. The ‘Meaning’ approach in SC is as good as it can get. The approach helps you save a lot of precious time and energy.

The CR and RC sections are equally good but just that they are more helpful to improve accuracy than time. However, the exam demands saving precious time and that is something that the candidate needs to improve on his/her own. Practice can be a better tool here.

The ready summary with pdf for each chapter is a great tool to revise quickly. I used to read those pdfs when I was at work and thus kept in touch with the SC concepts which I was likely to forget otherwise. I took my GMAT and scored a sweet 720 (Q51V36).

An added advantage with e-GMAT course is that you get 800score and Grockit access free of cost. 800score tests are easy but they expect higher accuracy of you. The quant is of the same level as GMAT but Verbal is easy. The Grockit tests are nearest to the real GMAT. Initially, I hated them but by the end of my preperation I had changed my opinion of them. The Quant is a notch higher than the real thing and the verbal is a notch lower but still they are as close as you can get. Though their scoring is wrong and even a few of their questions are marked wrongly - which can be frustrating at times, they are a good practice because they give you the same feel of urgency that the GMAT delivers. Their user interface is very poor and they should change it immediately. The way the test answers are displayed without any time analysis doesn’t help a candidate’s cause.

Overall, I have recommended e-GMAT to a lot of my friends who are preparing for GMAT. The stepping stone is the free strategy session, after that its e-GMAT all the way.

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I selected e-GMATfor mainly two reasons. I was impressed by the way Mr. Sadana took the class in strat session 1 and I liked their audio video approach rather than reading from a book after a 10 hr workday (6 day week).
The reason I was able to make a good pace in e-GMAT was I neither read any other book nor I had any apprehensions of any other process. So I didn't need to unlearn anything. So it was easy for me to adopt their process since that is the only way known to me
Sentence Correction: Three step sentence correction approach: In the first SC session, Ms. Payal asks everyone in the class about the most important aspect in SC, and 8 out of 10 said – Grammar and I am sure that most of the guys reading this post thinks the same.
But with her logic that grammar is only a tool which is used to convey the meaning (purpose), made us understand that understanding the meaning of a sentence is more vital than knowing bunch of grammatical rules. I can say that this changed my approach towards SC questions. None of us here are grammarians and most of us don’t know all the rules of grammar. Even if you know all the rules of grammar, there can be two answer choices which are grammatically correct but only one will convey the intended meaning.
There is more than one instance where I was able to pick the correct choice concentrating on the meaning of the sentence when I was confused between two or three answer choices.
Critical reasoning: Pre – thinking has greatly improved my accuracy and test time in CR passages. Many of you who are familiar with the process may think it will take a lot of time or it is very difficult to pre think. But take it from me, once we internalize the process (it will take time to get used to it and sometimes, we forget to pre think but keep on trying and after some time you will start to pre think even with out realizing), it’s basically not selecting from the given choices because you already know the answer--you just need to search for the answer or something similar to that. Believe it or not guys, I was able to finish my verbal 15 mins before the scheduled time and I pre thought.

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I took my GMAT for the first time in Oct '12 and again in March '13. I am planning to take it for the third time in Oct '13. When I took my GMAT for the first time, my verbal came out to be my weakest area. After reading various reviews on trusted GMAT sites, e-GMAT came out to be the obvious choice. I went for the Verbal Live Prep. I completed 70-80% of the course and appeared for the GMAT. I saw a 5 point increase in my score from 20 to 25. I am now preparing to complete the entire course and I am sure I will improve my score by 8-10 points further!
The structure of the course is very well planned and with diligent preparation. A multi-fold increase in your score is guaranteed. Go for it!

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I wrote GMAT thrice and every time i came out of the exam centre i was disappointed, had my shoulders down, and felt as if i was unfit to crack GMAT. Here are my scores-- 570,590, and 600.

But after going through many reviews on Gmat Club, i found that E-Gmat customers are doing well in GMAT, especially non-native speakers, in verbal section. My weak area is verbal and everytime i was scoring in twenties in that section. So, i have decided to sign up for E-Gmat Verbal Live Prep and started my journey with E-gmat on october-2-2012.

As suggested by E-Gmat tutors i planned my schedule as follows.

1) As quant is my strength, first i worked on my weak areas and got ready with quant in first month ( october ).
2) Once we register to the course, we can attend the whole course 4 times. So, in the first few months i worked only on SC and made sure that i get 90% of the questions correct. ( Dec to mid-jan ).
3) Then i started preparing for CR ( mid-jan to feb ).
4) Then RC ( March ).
5) Then i formed a 30 day schedule. I took 5 mock tests every week.( April ).
6) After taking 2 mock tests i scheduled my REAL GMAT TEST. ( May 8th ).
7) I took my last Mock on may 5th and scored 720 in GMAT PREP 2.

I felt confident that i could get a good score but didnt dare to predict it. Finally after writing the exam i saw a 710( Q49, V39 ). I was very happy because i got 88 percentile V39 in verbal, which is more than 83 percentile Q49.

WHAT MADE THE DIFFERENCE:

1) E-gmat has a structured way for the non-native speakers to do well in verbal.
2) As soon as i completed a section, for example SC, i practiced SC in GROCKIT ( we shall get our account created once we register to VERBAL LIVE PREP ). This really has a huge impact.
3) The way E-gmaters approach SC will for sure increase the accuracy in SC section. ( Meaning based approach ).
4) Come what may-- Follow your schedule religiously. We shall excel for sure.

I improved my score by 110 marks. I recommend all the non-native speakers, who are weak in verbal, to join E-gmat because results are for sure. I wasted more than RS 1,00,000 for my coachings and exams. I dont want others to fall in the traps of unworthy coaching centres.

Finally, I thank all of you, who read my long post. Thanks alot RAJAT, PAYAL, and ARCHANA. You people made me cross the 700 barrier.

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From my own personal experience, If anyone is looking for concept building, or for a score improvement on the verbal section, then e-GMAT Verbal Live Prep is the ideal course for the person. The simple language used to clarify the concepts makes it an ideal platform for non natives to build a good understanding.

The 3 step process preached, in the course and at e-GMAT, is one of the most simple and innovative method. The concepts and the process to apply the concepts differentitates e-GMAT Verbal Live Prep from its competitors in the Industry and have vastly benifited me.

The course offers the most comprehensive free material offered in the industry and has an extensive question bank focusing around the concepts and official questions. The instructors Shraddha, Payal, Rajat and Chiranjeev are world class. They are easily available on public and private forums and are striving hard to simplify any and every problem faced by students.

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I used the e-GMAT course and was able to score 700 (Q50 V35). I took the e-GMAT SC course. It is a simply a perfect course. Its price is completely reasonable, and it really improves your SC abilities since it use several new concepts that I have never seen before. This course added another 20% to my sentence correction skills! I was introduced to this web site through one of my friends, claiming his 70% ability in SC improved to 90%, and I believe he was completely right! The course is really comprehensive, I could find out every necessary section in it.

e-GMAT uses a multimedia environment that makes it pretty easy to understand the tough problems of SC. One of main problems was that I am not native speaker; thus, I could not find out why some answer choices were FALSE AND WORDY despite being grammatically correct. This course helped me a lot since for each question it discussed each of 5 answer choices with regards to grammar and the intended meaning. Thank you e-GMAT

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This course begins with basic level and moves to advanced level. The topics are classified as per the level of difficulty and have been split into Concept files, Application files, Practice files. All the files in this course are relatively short, lasting to 20-30 minutes.
SC : The focus is on understanding the meaning of the sentence first and strategy is to divide sentence into smaller parts. The answers might be grammatically correct but logically wrong. Only when the intended meaning of the sentence is clear, I can get to the correct answer.

CR : Strategy of pre-thinking is the key for CR. I just followed the pre-thinking process as taught and not only improved my accuracy but also my timing to answer CR questions.

RC: Strategy of passage summaries at various stages of reading the passage proves enough to answer the questions correctly.

The best part is Verbal Live Prep. The live sessions are easy to understand and they cover the more challenging problems. The live sessions are very interactive and give a chance to understand the thought process of the instructors on how to use the e-GMAT process to tackle hard questions. In addition to learning from the instructors, I also learn from other attendees as they give an idea about how many different ways one can think about a particular question type.

Also Online classes are best for those who work full-time. Even if you miss any class you can access the recordings or attend the next online class from another batch as they run simultaneous batches.

Grockit one year membership is free for with Live prep course and complement the e-GMAT course well as one can practice with large question bank with quizzes and tests .

I suggest e-GMAT to all students who are struggling with verbal . ESPECIALLY FOR NON NATIVES , The strategies taught are very helpful and if followed diligently will surely improve verbal scores.

I'm already seeing an improvement in my verbal accuracy and I am now constantly scoring around 35-38 in my mock tests. My GMAT is next month, and I will reach my target score of 40.

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I signed up for e-GMAT verbal Live course late last year. I previewed several courses on the market and decided to go with e-GMAT considering the course content, teaching methodology and practice exercises. You can’t beat the price for the quality of the content you get. I’m very happy with the online content you get with the live classes. Each chapter has a quiz at the end which gauges your understanding of the topic. I felt more confident after each chapter and improved my scores after each test.

Live classes dealt difficult topics with much needed detail and the instructors concentrated more on the strategy rather than the quick short cuts. At times, I felt like the live classes were geared more towards students with prior preparation or test experience. I’d recommend smaller class size and more formal approach in the initial classes for students who start their prep with e-GMAT.

The instructors are awesome. I loved their classes on prethinking and exam preparation techniques.

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