I took my official GMAT yesterday and got a 660 (Q50, V29). Like anyone else who's put in time and effort (not to mention investing a bit of money), I'm very disappointed and embarrassed with my score. But I'm also having doubts about the scoring algorithm/adaptiveness of the verbal section, which is what this post is about.
Below are the scores of my last 5 practice tests -
GMATPrep 1 - 710 (Q49, V38)
Kaplan - 710 (Q49, V39)
Veritas Prep - 740 (Q50, V41)
Princeton Review 680 (Q42, V42) - Assuming quant score is an anomaly here because I got only 7 wrong, none of which were in the first 10 questions and none of which were consecutive mistakes.
GMATPrep 2- 710 (Q50, V36)
As you can see, lowest I've scored in verbal was 36. Assuming these practice tests are reasonably indicative of how the difficulty level of the actual GMAT is, I don't think I was wrong in expecting questions of similar difficulty in the official GMAT and consequently, a similar verbal score as well (not less than V35).
However, in the test, very few questions I got were anywhere close to the difficulty level seen in these practice tests, they were much more difficult than those I'd seen during prep, and I'm sure I wasn't so underprepared that I was not able to get basic verbal questions right. I estimate about 7-8 questions at the same difficulty level as these tests and the OG, and I got them towards the end of the test by which time I guess I'd made a lot of mistakes for the difficulty level to come down.
My questions are -
1) Is there any chance that the test didn't exactly adapt to my level and kept throwing 700+ level questions at me for pretty much the whole duration of the section?
2) Is there any chance I was scored lower for this section than what the usual norm is?
3) I understand that I can report this to GMAC since the scoring goes through another round or two of verification. Where can I do so?
Thanks in advance!