V40+, 740+ in Practice Exams to V34, 680 in the GMAT. Retake strategy?

Hi guys,

I just took my first GMAT attempt 2 days ago. I thought the test went pretty decently and was expecting a 700+ comfortably. I was surprised to see the unofficial score pop up on my screen with a 680 (V34, Q49). The Quant score was pretty much what I expected it to be (even though it is true that the actual test is several notches higher in difficulty than OG), but the Verbal score was shocking. In my GMATPrep tests, I was consistently scoring well in Verbal and was finding it hard to break the Q49 level, so I knew that on test day, Verbal would dictate my overall score. My target score is 750 and I need help with a retake strategy.

Disclaimer: this is a long post, pre-empting any questions that may arise about my preparation. I have included a TL;DR and some questions at the end of the post (or should I say essay?). I would be very grateful for some advice.

Listing out my official Practice Exam scores:

Practice Exam 1: (670. V35, Q47. This was a diagnostic, taken without any prep)
Practice Exam 2: (700. V35, Q49)
[a break of over 2 months]
Practice Exam 1 (reset): (750. V44, Q49)
Practice Exam 3: (730. V40, Q49)
Practice Exam 4: (760. V42, Q50)
Practice Exam 5: (710. V40, Q48)
Practice Exam 6: (760. V47, Q48)

I took my first test in the beginning of February. After taking the diagnostic, I found that in Verbal I was most comfortable with RC, fairly comfortable with SC and that CR would require the most work. My fundamentals in Quant are fairly strong and I felt that I just needed a bit more practice in it. In the next 2-3 weeks, I went through the important parts of Powerscore CR and practiced Q and V questions from OG 2022. I took the second test, and after scoring 35 in Verbal again and struggling to complete all questions in time, I realised that SC would require more than just OG practice for me to get to my target score and that hitting my target of Q50 would require some more work as well.

After the second test, I couldn't study for the next 1.5 months or so because work got pretty hectic, but once I got the chance to restart, I studied for another 2 weeks before taking the next test. In this time, I went through Manhattan's SC book entirely and made notes, and skimmed through Manhattan's Quant book to brush up on the Quant topics that are heavily tested and that I felt I was weak in. I also went through most of GMATClub's Math book. Then I practiced questions from OG 2022 and the GMATClub forums (I made sure not to do OG2022 ones from the forums). I was unsure about resetting a test and taking it, but found many people on the forums saying that especially in the first 2 tests, there is a large bank of questions to draw from so repeat questions are few and far in between. I scored 750 in this test and ~40% of the Verbal questions felt familiar. In Quant, some questions felt familiar but I didn't remember how to solve most of them, so it was still okay. I knew this score was a bit inflated so I didn't let it instill a false sense of confidence, and decided to purchase the next pack of tests to get a clearer sense of my progress. This was in the last week of April, and each of the tests I took after this one was one week apart.

Scored 730 in Practice Exam 3 and was happy to see Verbal touching 40 and being able to complete the questions in time for the first time (not counting the reset test). Seeing Quant stuck at 49 for the last 3 tests, I felt I needed to do something more and signed up for 2 weeks of GMATClub's Quant tests.

I practiced only OG questions for Verbal from the online question builder: I would do 20 question sets with a mix of SC and CR (and sometimes separate, 10 question sets of RC) and thoroughly analyse my errors; I maintained an error log and searched for the questions I got wrong on GMATClub for better explanations than the ones OG would provide.

After scoring 760 in the 4th test, I considered riding the wave of confidence and taking the actual test the next week. My Verbal scores had been on a steady rise and Quant reached 50 for the first time. At the time I thought that another advantage of taking the test then would be that in the unfortunate situation in which I might have to retake it, I would have 2 unused official tests as well. But ultimately, I decided not to go down this route since I had only completed around 50% of OG's Verbal questions and felt that if I had more 750+ scores under my belt, I would feel even more confident to score similarly in the test.

Scored 710 in the next one and was disappointed. The drop in score was largely due to some silly mistakes and poor time management in Quant. Quant dipped to 48 for the first time since I restarted studying, and Verbal still didn't go below 40 but fell compared to my last score because I had to rush through/guess 3-4 questions. I told myself that I would be strict about my time management and that this score was an outlier.

In my last test I scored 760, but Quant remained at 48 which was a bit concerning. I got only 6/31 questions wrong in Quant and still scored 48, but I guess that was because of the kind of questions I got wrong. Time management was fine in this one, almost all incorrect questions were silly mistakes. In Verbal however, I only got 2/36 questions wrong and got 47, my best score yet. Out of official tests and with another 760 practice score, I scheduled my test for a week after. I was feeling confident about Verbal and my accuracy in OG practice sets reflected this confidence: from 70-80% accuracy earlier, I started getting 80-95% of those 20 questions correct in the 2-3 weeks leading up to the real test. In my practice tests, I would get an average of 12-13 out of 14 correct in RC, 6-7 out of 9 in CR and 10-11 out of 14 in SC.

In the week leading up to the test, I practiced some OG questions and reviewed my error log and notes. I approached test day confident of a 730, hopeful for a 750. I was a bit nervous but fairly calm, not very anxious. I felt Verbal went pretty decently, the first RC passage felt a little difficult and took longer than usual for me, but I thought I got at least 2-3 out of the 4 questions correct. Other than this, there was a period of maybe 10-15 minutes in between where I was feeling anxious and felt like I was lagging behind in terms of the time, but I recovered from that. I just had to skip 1 CR question to gain some time and ultimately finished 1 or 2 minutes before time. I was expecting at least V40, because whenever I had finished Verbal on time in my practice tests I scored 42+, and even when I had to skip 3-4 questions in Practice Test 5, I scored 40.
Quant went fine, certainly felt harder than OG but I could manage most of it. I did run short of time and had to guess on/rush through maybe 4-5 questions but I tried to scatter my guesses as much as possible. After I was done with both sections, I was more concerned about Quant bringing my score down than Verbal, but was still hopeful of 730+.

After I was done with IR and AWA (both of which went well, I scored 8 and 6 respectively), I was shocked to see my unofficial composite score, especially the Verbal. My Verbal score was 34, lower than even my diagnostic! I found (still find) this very hard to accept considering my practice test scores and the fact that I didn't really feel that anxious or that I was performing well below my level in the actual test. After the Verbal section was over, when I tried to assess it, it felt like any other Verbal section in which I scored 40-47. I can understand that the V47 from my last practice test may have been an outlier, but even my average across the last 4 tests comes up to 40-42 so I cannot understand how I got a 34. My average composite score since after that break in between (and since I started studying more seriously and regularly) is 740, not counting the reset test. 680 seems very hard to swallow, and I can't understand what went wrong so badly – I have only practiced official Verbal questions, my earlier scores were not inflated, I was not especially anxious on test day and I got a good amount of sleep. I took the GMAT Online so I can't even get an Enhanced Score Report to get an indication of what went wrong.

I am now feeling pretty lost, I definitely need to retake the test but I'm not really sure what to work on in these 2 weeks, since what I believed was my strength is the section that brought down my score. I want to score 750, which I believed was very possible considering my practice scores, but this result has shaken my confidence. Please help me with a retake strategy. I would also like to hit Q50 if that is possible in 2 weeks, so that I don't have to rely as much on Verbal to help me hit my target. I have exhausted all 6 official tests and completed most of OG 2022's Verbal questions (I have maybe around 80 SC and CR questions left in total).

I have the following questions:

• Should I just treat this as an aberration, continue to do what I was doing earlier, draw belief from my Practice Exam scores and hope that this time it goes well?
• Which practice test(s) should I take and how many should I take in the next 2 weeks? Should I reset the official Practice Exam 2 or should I take the MGMAT test(s)? Everyone swears by only OG for Verbal, so I'm not sure if taking the MGMAT tests will help with whatever practice is required in the section that let me down on test day.
• For Verbal, should I just practice the remaining OG 2022 Verbal questions (including RC)? Or should I buy the OG Questions Pack, or do something more?
• For Quant, should I practice from OG to ensure that I get at least the Easy and Medium questions in the test correct, or should I also do GMATClub and/or Manhattan questions if I want to hit Q50?
• Is there any argument for me to wait longer than 2 weeks to retake it?

TL;DR: Scored an average of V40-42 and composite 740 in my last 4 Practice Exams, but V34 and 680 in the real thing. Target is 750, need help with a retake strategy.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you.