(letters based on your notes from above)
a. do the essays from now on; you need to make sure you can perform at your highest potential even after having had to write 2 essays
c. take the breaks!
d. not a good idea - take the practice tests when you are fresh and at the same time of day as you plan to take the real test. Mimic the real test conditions as much as possible.
e. Not true. If you can "barely focus" then your performance is dropping quite a bit.
f.
Overall, timing stays steady at 73 min each
I'm not just concerned about your overall timing. I'm also concerned with the time allocation for each question. I talk with students all the time who finish the section on time but still seriously mis-manage their time between questions while doing the section. So dig into this data a bit more.
This is the ideal:
SC - about 60-75 sec; max of 90 sec
CR - about 2m; max of 2.5m
RC - about 2.5m (short) to 3.5m (long) to read; about 1 min for general purpose questions; about 1.5 to 2 for everything else
quant - about 2m; max of 2.5m
If you are going over the max listed on more than 1 or 2 questions, then you are mis-managing your time.
Stop doing so many tests. CAT exams are really good for (a) figuring out where you're scoring right now, (b) practicing stamina, and (c) analyzing your strengths and weaknesses. The actual act of just taking the exam is NOT so useful for improving. It's what you do with the test results / between tests that helps you to improve.
Think about a professional athlete (I'll use my favorite sport, tennis). When two athletes are playing a match, they are
doing, not learning. They're just using everything they've already learned in an attempt to win the match. That's what we're doing when we take practice CATs. The "sectional tests" you describe are also
doing, when you should be concentrating more on
learning.
After the match, the players watch video and, with their coaches, figure out what went well, what went poorly, and what needs to change before the next match. The players then start practicing specific things, hitting the weight room, etc, and then continually analyzing their practice and progress to figure out, again, what to keep doing and what to change. That's what we're doing when we study, try practice problems, review and analyze those problems, etc.
In GMAT terms, it takes at least a week (and usually longer) before we have made any appreciable difference to our skills, so there's no really good reason to take a practice test more frequently than once a week. (And, even then - I'd say every 2 to 3 weeks.) I only recommend that my students go to a frequency of once a week when they are two to three weeks away from the official test.
Re: why tiredness might affect verbal more than quant - well, first of all, quant always comes first, which means you're always even more exhausted when you hit verbal (especially if you're skipping the essays - you're much more fresh on quant then). Second, our comprehension suffers more when we're tired, and verbal is a lot more about comprehension.
Your exhaustion is pulling you down, and the source of your exhaustion is primarily your focus on doing rather than learning, as described above. Stop doing so much. In a 2-hour study period, you should be doing problems for only about 30-40 minutes. The rest of that time should be spent analyzing / reviewing those problems.
See here for some ideas about how to do that (I just wrote another post to someone else about the same general idea):
https://www.beatthegmat.com/how-should-i ... 44088.html (see post from Sep 16)
