Testing Advice

My take is that, even though you have been preparing for a while, you have not developed solid GMAT skills. If you had, you would naturally use those skills rather than fall into "relying on natural ability and stamina.

It may be that the reason that your skills are not solid is that the approaches you are using are not logic-based and robust, but rather somehow gimmicky and unreliable. If your approaches were solid at their foundations, reliable, and obviously useful, it stands to reason that you would use them consistently, regardless of whether you are simply answering practice questions or taking a test.

So, probably, you have to adjust your approaches to answering quant and verbal questions to make them more logic-based, robust, and reliable, and then you have to practice a lot more until you master using those approaches and use them naturally.
This process is something that you have to accept and become accustomed to, partly through additional practice.


Your use of the word "robotic" may be a clue here. If your approach is robotic, probably what you are doing is too rigid, perhaps as a result of your approaches not being sufficiently logic-based, robust, and reliable, as discussed above, and also not sufficiently adaptable. It seems likely that you are operating in a way that does not completely make sense, one such that, rather than connecting directly with the process of answering the questions, you are using "approaches" that are "supposed to" work.

Generally speaking, probably you have to adjust your overall approach so that it is less of a GMAT specific approach that you developed from reading a bunch of GMAT prep materials to a life skills and logic-based, flexible, and at times out-of-the-box approach involving your directly connecting with the process of answering the questions rather than operating like a puppet master behind a curtain using "approaches." Yes, of course, there are GMAT specific aspects of any good approach to taking the test, but you have to integrate those aspects with your life skills, logical skills, hacking skills, and anything else that you would use to arrive at correct answers.

That was exactly the type of feedback I was looking for. I heavily appreciate it.