Experience Breakdown & Observations, Advice Needed for Verbal

GMAT 1 - 710 (q49, v36) IR - 4 (last year score, applied to several schools, waitlisted at 2, both provided feedback that I need a better GMAT score to be more competitive in the international pool)

GMAT 2 - 710 (q50, v36) IR - 7

GMATPrep Mock Scores -
GMATPrep 1 (Retook after a year) - 740 (q48, v42)
GMATPrep 2 (Retook after a year) - 760 (q49, v42)
GMATPrep 3 (First Time) - 740 (q48, v42)
GMATPrep 4 (First Time) - 750 (q49, v44)

Second GMAT Experience -

My quant went very well. I found the questions much easier than the ones I've practiced on GMATPrep and on GC. I scored a higher sectional in quant - q50 than on any of my mocks (Q49, 49, 48 and 49). Managed time well for the first time too. In my mocks I always had to rush on the last few questions on the mocks.

Observation - I've learnt that the GMAT isn't ALL that adaptive. I skipped and made a few educated guesses on some pretty hard questions. Still scored a Q50. Score well in the first 10-15 questions and make sure you get most if not all of the easy (sub 600) and medium (600-700) questions right and you'll cross Q49. You can do that by not wasting time on tough questions on topics you're uncomfortable with and which most probably you'll get wrong anyway. This ensures you don't have to rush through the questions you would have and should get right.

IR went well as well. Improved from 4 to 7.

The verbal completely destroyed me though. I scored v36 again on the official exam! My mock verbal scores were v42 thrice and a single v44. I had given the mock exams with settings as realistic as possible to the actual exam. I stuck to the time limit for breaks and completed the essay and IR sections as well.

1. Extremely long RC passages. Two with 4 paras, one with 5 paras. I actually cursed under my breath when I got the third RC with 5 paragraphs and I was already pretty short on time.

2. RCs were TOUGH. Condensed with information. Much less fluff. And use of some difficult vocabulary. I am an enthusiastic reader and often read material from the Economist, Scientific American, FT etc. I also watch a LOT of science and history videos so essays on black holes, women's history, economic principles etc usually do not faze me and I can grasp the concepts of the essays fairly easily. Not so on the exam yesterday. There were times I would re-read paras from a passage 3-4 times and still wouldn't be able to clearly understand what it meant. This made answering questions much harder.

3. CRs were tougher too. On the mocks I can usually be 90% confident that the answer I've chosen is correct. Yesterday, I would almost always be confused between two answer choices I had narrowed down to. The mocks usually give 1 clear answer and 2-3 answer choices where they directly oppose or are irrelevant to what the question stem asks for. For eg a question where the correct answer choice should weaken, a few answer choices actually strengthen so those can be eliminated much quickly. Much less of these on the actual exam. For a few CRs I had to juggle between 2-3 answer choices that could be technically correct and had to figure out which would be the 'best' answer.

4. Same for SC. Much more confusing. Not many easy splits. No 'as vs like' type choices. Not many options that you could clearly eliminate. SCs broke my confidence as well. There were times I was going back to reconsider answer choices that I had eliminated because I couldn't figure out clear grammatical or 'change in meaning' errors that would disqualify a sentence.

5. The average number of mistakes I made on mocks ranged from (3 to 8) in verbal. I would not do more than 3-4 incorrect questions on RC and CR COMBINED. 96 percentile scores made me very confident that I would be able to do fairly well on verbal on the actual exam. Sadly this was not to be. A v36 on the exam means I definitely got more than 12-13 questions wrong. Probably even 1/3rd off all questions.

6. All of the above screwed my timing completely. I have never had to struggle on time management on verbal before. But by the time I reached the 25th question mark, I was left with a minute per question for the last 15 questions. I had to blaze through a lot of questions.

TLDR - Screwed up verbal. Much tougher questions than the ones on GMATPrep. Need advice on practicing questions of greater difficulty and with better accuracy. Would be extremely grateful for any help.

1. Should I consider doing LSAT RCs for practice? I've read threads where people have confirmed LSAT RCs are also mostly on the same themes as GMAT - science, history etc. I've exhausted most good sources for verbal.

2. I cancelled my new score. Should I include this in my score report to indicate I retook to improve my score? Also went from Q49 to Q50. Better IR score.

3. I'm able to do well on SC with multiple splits and where answer choices change meaning. I have much less accuracy on short SC questions though that purely test grammar and have only a few words different among them. Any suggestions on how to tackle these?