I f****d up and I don't know how I did it.

The lack of sleep could have played a major role. As for why your performance on Q was not affected, but that on verbal was, again there are plausible explanations.

Lack of sleep is a funny thing. It is possible to perform at high level for a given time period. After this initial period of euphoria runs down quickly, the subsequent performances are likely to be much worse. The GMAT is a long test that requires optimal utilization of energy levels.

Your verbal knowledge appears to be good, at least judging from the practice tests. So, it is likely that your energy levels dropped due to poor sleep. One idea is to practice your sleep patterns much before the test date arrives. GL!

Hi achbaa,

To start, taking a GMAT on NO SLEEP would impact just about any Test Taker - and if you do not consistently take notes when working through Verbal questions, then the impact of that lack of sleep could have been considerably worse. That one factor could potentially explain everything about this drop in your Score, but there could be other factors to consider.

A little over 2 weeks ago, you posted that you had taken two CATs in early September and Scored V34 and V43 - and that's a fairly substantial difference in performances. What did you do differently in less than a week to pick up those 9 Verbal Scaled Score points? Did you actually hone all of the necessary skills to consistently score at that higher level - or were you potentially taking your CATs in an unrealistic way (including seeing 'repeat' questions that you already knew the answers to)?

In addition, in that prior post, you mentioned that you were not planning to take the GMAT until January (in 4 months time). Did some aspect of your plans change - and were you dealing with some additional complications/stress that was effecting more than just your Test Taking?

You almost certainly have the necessarily skills to score 700+ right now, but before you retest, you have to consider all the factors that might have kept you from performing at your best on Test Day. The lack of sleep is an obvious issue, but it's not necessarily the only one.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Hi! To be fair I have done a lot of work on Verbal over the past weeks - I attended courses totaling about 40 hours just for Verbal, including private tutor, plus did about 2-3 hours of questions daily, so I felt really confident in my Verbal section prior to the exam date. My test scores were also a lot more even these past few weeks - after that low Verbal I haven’t scored below V40 I think, and not below V42 in my last few CATs.

My might be right about unrealistic CATs, but I’d certainly did best I knew - I did them in my room, timed, and used new CATs each time - i.e. I used total 3 GMAT official CATs and 4 Kaplan CATs, with timed breaks etc. obviously some aspects - like nerves - I was not able to simulate, but I felt pretty comfy in the test center and that it was as an experience pretty close to my mocks ?

Posted from my mobile device

Hi achbaa,

I've sent you a PM with some additional questions.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Hi achbaa,

I’m sorry to hear how things went with the GMAT.

Assuming that you took your official practice exams under realistic testing conditions, the results show that, on a good day, you are capable of scoring higher than V37. Thus, it’s quite possible that nerves, stress, tiredness, or a combination of all three negatively affected your test-day performance. However, it’s also possible that you have some lingering weaknesses that were exposed on test day. Although I’m unsure of how you prepared, it’s possible that, in your preparation, particularly in verbal, you did not really learn to do what you have to do in order to score high on the actual GMAT. Rather, you picked up on some patterns that were effective in getting you relatively high scores on practice tests. So, for you to hit your score goal, your preparation, particularly for verbal, probably needs to be more complete, meaning that you have to go through the various types of GMAT questions carefully to find your exact weaknesses, fill gaps in your knowledge, and strengthen your skills.

The overall process will be to learn all about how to answer question types with which you currently aren't very comfortable and do dozens of practice questions category by category, basically driving up your score point by point. When you do dozens of questions of the same type one after the other, you learn just what it takes to get questions of that type correct consistently. If you aren't getting close to 90 percent of questions of a certain type correct, go back and seek to better understand how that type of question works, and then do more questions of that type until you get to around at least 90 percent accuracy in your training. If you get 100 percent of some sets correct, even better.

For verbal specifically, you have to become more skilled at clearly defining the differences between trap choices and correct answers. Otherwise, you will get stuck guessing between two choices or be surprised to find that you incorrectly answered questions that you thought you answered correctly. Becoming more skilled in this way takes carefully analyzing all of the answer choices to lots of verbal questions to develop an eye for the logical differences between the choices. In other words, you have to go beyond answering practice questions and reading explanations to doing deep analysis of questions to learn to see everything that is going on in them.

You also may find my article with more information regarding
how to score a 700+ on the GMAT helpful.
Feel free to reach out with further questions.