Hi Guys,

I gave my GMAT on July 14 and scored 730 (q49 v41).
I improved from 660 (q48 v33) that I got in 2015, when I had no clue on how to crack the verbal section. I used to attempt Verbal using how it sounds and more often than not I used to get it wrong. On the quants side, I had scored 48 and knew that I can improve it with more practice.

In my pursuit to crack verbal, I discovered eGmat about a year ago and realized that there is a method to crack verbal. I took the verbal online prep to begin with but after attending a few live prep free sessions, I upgraded to live prep course. I was a major procastinator as I never got myself to sincerely prepare for the exam till Feb-Mar 2017.

I finally took up eGmat seriously in April 2017 and worked on it during the weekends. The best part about the course was that I could immediately access the live sessions to fast forward the sections as I was running short of time. I went through the entire course content in about two months spending about 7-10 hours per week largely during weekends.

I know people say that you should work with just one prep company to save conflicting approaches but I would advise against this single prep company approach. I actually used resources from three different sources and took GMAT Prep mock test to ensure that I am on track.

To put some context, I am an Indian Finance Professional with technical undergrad degrees and work 60 hour weeks in the Investment Management industry. I am listing out the resources that helped me achieve 730:

Verbal:
1. Foundation was built on solid eGmat course material
2. SC and CR was further improved using separate set of books that I got from a friend who had cracked 770!
3. Practiced only the medium difficulty and high difficulty questions from Scholaranium
4. RC practiced from Aristotle RC 99 (only medium difficulty passages)

Quant:
5. I did the basics from eGmat and practiced a little bit from the OG book
6. Data Sufficiency book of Veritas Prep - Most amazing resource that I have ever come across that explains strategies in the most beautiful manner - MUST STUDY FOR ANYONE WHO IS STRUGGLING WITH DS!
7. GMAT club tests for improving PS and DS skills by practicing only medium and high difficulty questions

Few take-aways for approaching the exam if anybody has significant time for preparation:

1. Build a strong foundation of Conceptual knowledge - I would suggest eGmat for verbal and to a certain extent for quants too but supplemented with Bunuel posts

2. Evaluate yourself using the 800 score tests (free with eGmat) to check the difficulty level and chapters where you are failing to answer correctly

3. Do focussed practice of the weak areas while simultaneously keeping in touch with the strong areas

4. Ensure that you study daily atleast in the last three weeks to the exam - I used to wake up at 6am and put in about three hours of study in the day split as below:
> (RC) An hour before leaving for office,
> (CR) About half hour while traveling,
> (Quants) Another hour post office work,
> (CR) Half hour while traveling back home,
> (SC) About an hour before calling it a day.
If you notice, I used to ensure that I go through all the subjects in a day, it helps to make your brain agile to tackle all the subjects in the actual exam. Please note that all this was happening while I had a demanding 12 hour job so you need to be kind of driven to take out time for studies.

5. Use ONLY GMAT Prep mock test in the last three weeks for evaluation of progress near the exam date. I got disastrous results when I took mocks of prep companies during my preparation even though I was confident of cracking 40 in verbal. The progress through the final month provided below:

Veritas - 18 Jun - 660 (q46 v35)
800Score - 25 Jun - 700 (q47 v38)
800Score - 26 Jun - 650 (q48 v31)

> Then purchased two exam packs of official GMAT Prep
GMAT Prep Exam Pack 1 - 1 Jul - 750 (q50 v41)
Veritas - 2 Jul - 650 (q45 V34)

> Bought Manhattan tests just to figure out if any test prep co gives any worthwhile comparison
Manhattan - 8 Jul - 650 (q42 v37)
GMAT Prep Exam Pack 2 - 9 Jul - 710 (q49 v36)

Actual GMAT - 14 Jul - 730 (q49 v41)
Coincidentally average of the two GMAT Prep mock test scores!

If you notice, all the mock tests by test prep companies gave a severely deflated result largely due to significant time management issues, which was not the case with any of the GMAT Prep mock tests.

Anyways, I used to give mock tests during weekends and study during the week according to the outcome and focus on improving my skills of solving difficult questions. I have to say that Scholaranium helped me a lot in improving my SC and CR to achieve an accuracy that I had not expected out of myself.

I also wish to thank eGmat for providing me access to GMAT club tests and question bank, which helped me improve my quants.

I would have preferred to study for a week or so because I knew I lacked dedicated practice but I had to meet the minimum hygiene levels and move onto applications.
Result - GMAT score of 730.

I hope some of you find this useful to plan your studies. Please pm me if you have any questions and I will try to address them as soon as possible (currently completely tied up with applications).

Best,
Aditya

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Like all non native test takers verbal was the more difficult aspect for me and within verbal sentence correction (SC) particularly. There are many concepts which were either not taught at school level or was difficult for me to recall. Topics like parallelism, Idioms and Modifiers was were either completely new or were challenging for me and this were E-GMAT excels with things like pre assessment quiz and post assessment quiz it really makes easy for you to understand where you stand. The topics are very well explained with very good and intuitive examples along with graphical examples in lot of cases. Along with this scholaranium (test taking platform) helps you assess how you do at various difficulty levels. All along I would like to say it is certainly very well designed and will certainly help improve improve your verbal a lot.

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Target Test Prep was instrumental to my GMAT success. I only had three weeks to prepare for the exam, and TTP allowed me to tailor a study plan to my exact needs. The course content was clear, easy to access and designed significantly better than what I found in test prep books. The program helped me determine what areas I needed to focus on, and then provided curriculum and practice exams to review. The content was divided into sections, each covering specific skills. Each section included a PowerPoint curriculum, and a handful of practice exams (easy, medium and hard) that were easy to manage and easy to track progress on. Without TTP I would not have been able to score as well as I did.

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i have been practising for the last few month, tried materials from various sources, veritas prep and MGMAT. i found MGMAT pretty helpful when it came to SC but i thought eGmat did a better job breaking down each sentence and explaining what role each word plays in that. i would definitely say it has helped me not only understand SC better but also helped solve the problems quicker.

overall my GMAT score wasn't great (680, Q47, V36), it was the math section that dissapointed me. i was actually happy with my verbal score, it was the same as the best score i had on the practice exams. hopefully with better preparation i can crack the 700 ceiling

the one thing i regret not doing is completing each section of SC in eGMAT, i was running short on time. this time i have 3 weeks to prepare and hopefully i can do a better job

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It has a very comprehensive approach to understanding the rules required to ace verbal. I would recommend this to anyone who is aiming for a 700 plus and is week in verbal section. The sentence correction section is extremely detailed and consists of all the concepts that are required to excel in verbal. The examples and the narration of the concepts throughout the course help to remain focused on the content. The course has helped to improve by at least 7 points in verbal. My first mock score was V31, Q50, while I ended up with V38, Q50 - 730 in my GMAT.

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I will highly recommend Magoosh's Quant to those who are just starting with their preparation. The amount of Questions which Magoosh has will be enough to put you in the territory of Q47. For a score greater than Q47 I think the best you can reach is Q48 provided that you attempt each and every question but I think you will require more resources than that.
The content is great and supported with Magoosh articles it will definitely lay down a solid foundation in terms of concepts.

I will not recommend Magoosh's Verbal Course as it is not as structured and detailed as it should be for a non-native speaker. For that I will recommend E-GMAT Verbal online prep.

Thank you

Shubham

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I couldn't have achieved this feat without the help of E-GMAT's Verbal Live Prep for sure. The course is so well defined that all you need is to give just an hour a day at minimum and a complete revision of the week's study on the weekend. I was not new to online courses when I subscribed to E-GMAT. I had already subscribed to Magoosh but I think Magoosh's Qaunt course is way better than their Verbal Course. I would suggest everyone to dig Manhattan Sentence Correction guide before delving into E-GMAT's Verbal Live prep. Although Manhattan's SC guide is an ocean of grammar rules and sentence structure but it will definitely create a strong base and then leave it to Verbal Live Prep for the rest.
The live sessions delivered by Krishna cemented the foundations laid in the interactive modules. I will highly recommend the E-GMAT Verbal live prep for non-native speakers. I improved 15 points in a matter of two months.

Thank you

Shubham

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The first time I attempted GMAT I wrote it without any coaching. I went the classic clichéd way :
1. Bought an OG
2. Bought Manhattan GMAT SC,CR and RC
3. Slogged problems on GMAT ( Buenel and BB practice sets)
4. Wrote free Mocks
End result : a disastrous first attempt.
The absolute shocker was my verbal score. And the first thing that came to my mind was that I had to improve in verbal so after reading a lot of reviews on GMAT Club and attending the first free webinar for SC from egmat I decided to give it a try and enrolled for the GMAT Online course. The best part about this course is the organized step by step approach to explain things. Heads up, the videos require a lot of time but they were totally worth it as it helped me understand the every detail also a step wise approach to solve the questions. I liked the videos for both RC and CR. By the end of the course I was very confident in attempting the questions.
While enough is already said about the course content, I believe the magic flavor is the scholarnaium. Scholaranaium is like a war practice zone where you can sharpen your saw. The best part about scholaranaium is that it acts like couture, you can tailor make the quiz according to your flexibility, this gives you an option to hone your skills at your own pace. We all know that reviewing and analyzing is the most crucial part of any quiz , and this is where scholaranaium helps you the most. It gives you the most awesome explanation by following E-Gmat’s three step process.

All I can say is Do give E-Gmat a shot, you wont regret it.

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I am a male, thirty-five years of age, and a native English speaker in the USA. I am single, no children, and therefore have more free time than many people my age. I graduated cum laude from a large state university in 2004 where I studied finance and economics. Immediately after undergrad I went to law school, practiced law for two years, and then worked in healthcare for eight years.

I took the GMAT in December 2016 and scored a 670 (48Q/34V) after several months of self-study with commonly used print materials. I found out in March 2017 that I was not accepted to the three top 25 programs to which I had applied. I thought my GMAT score was the biggest reason for lack of admission and the most important admission criteria that I could improve for the next application cycle. I was also told by several MBA admission consultants that the top finance programs want 49 or higher on quant. My quant had to improve to meet that threshold. My GMAC CAT verbal scores were at 40/41 (in April 2017) and combined with a 49 in Quant would enable a 720+ score. I spent a couple weeks evaluating the various online test prep services.

I chose Target Test Prep for Quant Prep because I had participated in some of the free Tuesday sessions with Jeff and watched some of the other free content TTP has on YouTube. I signed up for the TTP one month renewable plan and followed the short study plan so that I could sit for the test again and finally break 700. The first month I strictly followed the short study plan and found that the TTP program was easy to follow, had user friendly explanations in text and many also in video, and that these studies guided me to a deeper understanding of why every choice was correct or not. I also found that the answer explanations on TTP were far superior to the print materials I previously used to earn a 48Q. I had hoped that one month would be enough for me, but my GMAC CATs were not meeting my goal and I renewed TTP for a second month. During the second month I took practice quant exams nearly every night, including TTP tests that were composed entirely of previous wrong answers. The self-testing options were incredible and allowed me to focus on whatever section needed attention.
In addition to the amazing structured program, the people behind the program, Scott and Jeff, are TTP’s greatest assets. They were always available and responded to emails within a few hours. Scott even texted me while he was traveling internationally.

I took the official GMAT again in July 2017 and scored 700 with a 50Q and 34V. I am thrilled with my quant score and do not believe that I could have scored 50 without TTP. I highly recommend TTP and that you email TTP so that Scott or Jeff can recommend the right study plan for you.

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Manhattan Prep was a great program and got me the results that I wanted. I was really nervous about the GMAT because it had been several years since I had taken a college level math or writing course -- even in college I did not go very in depth on mathematics because I was a history major. However, Manhattan Prep's superb program prepared me faster and better than I had expected. The course is very well-organized and builds you up to reach your full potential. The instructors are very intelligent and are talented at keeping the course work engaging. They are also very responsive to questions. I would recommend their program to anyone.

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