Based on what you described, here's a guess:
You know you're taking the test soon, so you took this last practice test much more seriously than you took previous practice tests. Your nerves led you to hang on to quant questions much longer than you should - you weren't able to pull the plug, make an educated guess, and move on in the way you know you should. That caused you to run out of time, giving you a string of at least 6 questions in a row wrong at the end, and likely a few more b/c you were probably aware you were running out of time and were rushing, which increases your careless mistakes.
The WORST thing you can do is run out of time because the single biggest thing that can kill your score is a string of questions wrong in a row. Getting any one question wrong is no big deal, even if it's an easy question. Multiple questions in a row is what kills us.
Then, you were shaken up by what happened in the math section and you weren't able to concentrate as well on verbal.
Be happy that this happened in a practice test and not the real thing. Go figure out what you need to do to make sure that this DOES NOT happen on the real test. If you really did find yourself hanging on to math questions too long, you've GOT to get better at pacing and at educated guessing (the more comfortable you feel with educated guessing, the easier you will find it to pull the plug when you should).
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Stacey Koprince
GMAT Instructor
Director of Online Community
Manhattan GMAT
Contributor to Beat The GMAT!
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