Actual GMAT score VS GMAT Official Practice Exam scores

Hi everyone,

Just took my GMAT today and ended up with a score of 710, which was quite a disappointment given my target score of 760 and scores for the GMAT official practice exams.

Wanted to hear your experience with the difficulty levels of quant and verbal sections on actual GMAT vs GMAT official practice exams, and any advice on retaking the GMAT in a few weeks' time.

Baseline:
Exam 1 on 18 Oct 2020: 660 (Q44 V37) IR4

After a month of intermittent studying focused mostly on quant:
Exam 2 on 15 Nov 2020: 710 (Q48 V38) IR4 - saw that quant improved, hence decided to focus on verbal next (focused on SC and CR)

After about 2 months of studying (about 10-15 hours per week) focused on verbal:
Exam 1 Second attempt on 13 Dec 2020: 750 (Q48 V44) IR5

2 weeks before actual GMAT:
Exam 3 on 19 Dec 2020: 750 (Q48 V45) IR8
Exam 4 on 20 Dec 2020: 730 (Q49 V40) IR7 - made quite a few silly mistakes, hence the dip as compared with Exam 3
Exam 5 on 23 Dec 2020: 770 (Q50 V46) IR8
Exam 6 on 25 Dec 2020: 760 (Q49 V42) IR7

Actual GMAT exam on 28 Dec: 710 (Q49 V38) IR6, against target score of 760.
Quant score was within my expected range, but I felt that verbal could've been much better. I felt that I've understood the patterns in Verbal by the time I took my third practice exam, and was in fact more confident in verbal than quant by the time I was about to take the actual exam. However, my verbal score in actual GMAT is almost as bad as my baseline when I did practice exam 1 (without any studying), which was shocking to me given the time I've put into improving verbal.

I did feel the verbal questions for the actual GMAT was much more difficult than those in any of the practice exams I've taken, especially RC (I felt that the answer options for each RC question were much more convoluted and ambiguous). However, I'm not sure if there's really a significant discrepancy in difficulty levels between the actual GMAT vs the official practice exams (I purchased the extra practice exam packs so that I can get a consistent score range and better predict my actual GMAT score, but it turned out that they were not a good predictor). Would anyone shed some light on this?

Three additional factors for consideration:
1. Sleep: I didn't really sleep the night before the actual GMAT (not that I didn't want to, but couldn't fall asleep as much as I wanted to, despite knowing the importance of a good night's rest prior to the exam).
2. Timing: I struggled with the time management for verbal - perhaps due to the lack of sleep, my attention was not as focused and I took longer to process each question (having to reread once or twice). As a result, I had 1 minute on average for the last 10 questions or so.
3. Environment: I didn't feel particularly nervous during the actual exam at the test centre, but was a bit distracted by the movement of people and the person beside me breathing loudly. Perhaps this coupled with the lack of sleep really affected my attention.

I am now planning for my retake in a few weeks' time, and wanted to see if anyone's had similar experiences and could share any insights/advice based on their own experience with the actual GMAT vs practice exams. Any advice on the retake and the prep leading up to the retake would also be greatly appreciated.

Thank you so much!