Pranaybhasin,
I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help. First off, great job on quant! Q49 and Q50 are great scores, so keep up the good work. Since verbal clearly brought your score down, you need to spend time improving your verbal skills before your next GMAT.
Regarding your ESR, you bring up a very good point: your ESR probably won’t provide you with a clear picture of how to focus your prep to improve your verbal skills. Furthermore, since you scored a V32/V34 on your two GMATs, you likely need to improve all aspects of verbal to improve your GMAT score to 740+. Since you seem to be struggling most in SC and CR, start with those topics, and then continue to practice some RC.
I realize that you were able to perform better on your practice tests than on the real GMAT, so we need to determine WHY your verbal score dropped on test day. Certainly, stress could have played a role, but a more likely reason is that in your GMAT preparation, you did not really learn to do what you have to do in order to score high on the verbal section of the GMAT. Rather, you picked up on some patterns that were effective in getting you relatively high scores on practice tests but not applicable to the questions that you saw on the actual GMAT.
In my eyes, there is only one path forward: take a deep dive back into your verbal prep so you can individually master each topic, starting with the foundations before moving to more advanced topics. You have to learn to more clearly see what is going on in the questions and answer choices. Doing so will take working topic by topic, carefully answering questions as you work on each topic. You won't lock in a high verbal score by continuing to do what you did before this recent test. You have to adjust your training to become more skilled in clearly defining the differences between incorrect answers and correct answers.
In other words, you have to learn to make your reasons for eliminating choices less like these:
"This choice is too extreme."
"I don't see how this applies."
and more like this one:
"This choice seems to conflict with the premises of the argument but actually fits the constraints established by the premises and fails to attack the connection between the premises and the conclusion."
Feel free to keep me updated and reach out with any further questions. Good luck!
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