Hi cagi,
I’m sorry to hear how things went with your GMAT. First off, you must understand that you really have not put in a ton of study time (only 40 days). Most GMAT test-takers spend around 3 to 5 months to achieve a 700+ GMAT score. That said, given that your actual GMAT score was lower than your scores on your practice exams, we really need to determine what caused that score drop. Stress could have played a role, but a more likely cause 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 actual GMAT. Rather, you picked up on some patterns that were effective in getting you relatively high scores on practice tests.
In my eyes, there is only one path forward, and that is to take a deep dive back into your prep (especially for verbal) so you can individually master each topic, starting with the foundations before moving to more advanced topics. For verbal, you have to learn to see more of 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 to verbal questions.
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."
For quant, since you scored a Q47 (and as high as a Q49) on your first exam, it’s clear that you have a solid foundation. Thus, to improve your quant skills, you need to go through GMAT quant 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.
Moving forward, you may need to use some additional prep materials, so take a look at
success stories of past GMAT students as well as reviews of
various GMAT prep courses to see what prep materials have worked for other test-takers.
You also may find it helpful to read the following articles:
The Phases of Preparing for the GMAT and
How to Score a 700+ on the GMAT.
Feel free to reach out with further questions.
Good luck!
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