Beat GMAT despite poor CATs

Will keep this short.

Took the GMAT 4 times over the course of 2 years and finally finished yesterday with a 720 score (Q49 V39)

Other attempts:
650
610
660
720 (almost one year gap before I took this test)

Few things to note for people studying:

Last year I took the Veritas CATs and was scoring consistently in the 720-740s. However, my end result was a 660 on the official exam. After this, I realized that I should just take some time off to clear my head before getting back into this.

About 9 months later, I started studying again and after a month of hard-core studying, I took the same Veritas CATs. To my dismay, I was scoring between 620-650s consistently. I thought to myself that if a year back, I was scoring 720-740s on the Veritas CATs and ended up with a 660 on Test day, I don't even want to know where I will end up if I take the GMAT now after scoring 620-650.

What I came to realize is that while the Veritas questions were the same, the scoring was adjusted over the course of the year.

Long story short, the Veritas questions are very good but don't look into the scores too much. This discouraged me like no other.

Few other surprises I had today:

-Verbal: I took too much time on the first 35 questions to the point where I only had three minutes left with 6 questions to go. I randomly guessed the last 6 questions, but despite this, I scored a 39 on verbal (89th percentile).

- Quant: The "700 level" questions are not so bad if you recognize the patterns. For pattern recognition, what I did was dedicate a notebook to just jotting down certain PS and DS questions which I found to be interesting over the course of doing various problems. These are problems which may have a simple trick which makes the problems very easy after a small re-arrangment of the given facts. By the end of my studying, I must have had around 60 questions jotted down in this notebook. Everyday before I went to bed, I would just spend 20-25 minute skimming through these questions. If you are doing this for 20-25 days, your mind subconsciously picks up these patterns so when you see a somewhat similar problem on test day, your fingers start rearranging questions, etc on the pad without you even really thinking.

Other takeaways:
- It's not about how many practice questions you do. What's more important is that you thoroughly review the problems you missed and understand what exactly went wrong. If you don't understand your mistakes and just keep doing new problems, you're really not going to advance too much.

Suggested study materials:
- Empower GMAT
- Do every problem on OG Guide yourself and follow it up by playing the Empower GMAT video and seeing how they answered the problem.
- Problems from BeattheGmat and GMAT Club
- Veritas CATs

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