Hi.
To add to this conversation, I see some things going on, and maybe it all comes down to the same basic thing.
You have studied to understand, which is good, but it does not seem as if you have fully trained to score high on this test. For one thing, over all that time you took only two practice tests.
Scoring high on the GMAT is in the end really about two things, being good at getting right answers and being good at handling the test itself.
So I think that now that you have gone over the ideas that underlie the test you need to make your training going forward more results driven.
For instance, now you can go over that test, and see what you did easily and what you did less easily, and work on the stuff that was more challenging for you, one topic at a time, as some others have mentioned.
For instance you mentioned things that you felt you basically were better at than your test results would indicate. So maybe you need to get some more practice getting right answers to those types of questions so that next time you see them on a test you are more confident and a little tighter.
For quant, I tend to recommend the question bank at
https://bellcurves.com, which you can access by going to the GMAT area and setting up a practice account. You can get lots of topic by topic practice using that question bank.
When you do topic by topic practice, be sure to realize that understanding is not the end goal. Getting RIGHT answers by whatever means you can come up with is the end goal.
Another thing that you can do is take more CATs, one a week or something. As David mentioned, taking a test is not like doing sets of questions.Among other things, the questions on the test are mixed, there is time pressure and the test is feeding you more difficult questions as you get right answers. So one thing that will get your score to go higher is taking more tests, playing the GMAT like a video game.
You can play the game various ways. For instance, one thing I have seen done is taking one's time, seeing how many questions one can get right toward the beginning and middle of the test, even if one has to guess on some at the end. Then one seeks to stretch out the winning streak more in following practice tests. Another thing you could do is just get psyched to get a few more right answers each time you take a practice test. You look over the last test you took and see what you could have done better, do some prep, and then take another one.
See how it's like a game?
One person working with me was having trouble getting her score to go up. So she just started taking CATs, looking over her last CAT, preparing some, then taking the next one. She used official CATs, Manhattan CATs, Veritas CATs, 800Score CATs, and maybe even others too. So she was really getting practice taking the test, and by analyzing her performance she decided what to work on between CATs.
If she saw that she would have scored much higher had she been better at, say, rate problems, remainders and critical reasoning, she would work on those things, and then take another CAT and see how she did.
So she was addressing just the right things and getting very accustomed to handling the test, and working that way worked like a charm, as she drove her score all the way up to 750.
You don't have to worry too much about forgetting things, because in working that way, you are always addressing the areas that need work. So if you aren't remembering something, that weakness will come out in your test results and you will work on it.
Overall, the thing to realize is that the GMAT is not asking you whether you know about a list of things. In fact you could score well into the 700's and totally blow off learning about certain things that show up on the test. All you need to do to hit your score goal is to be good enough at enough things to hit that goal. Right? So, so what if you forget how to do certain things. As long as you remember how to do enough things to score over 600, you are set.
So maybe my message is to let your preparation from now on be more right answer driven and test driven and less list driven.
You might get some more insight from this post.
https://infinitemindprep.com/raising-you ... the-board/
