I agree that practice tests can be frustrating, especially when they do something that you do not expect.
I will not say that this is a perfect test and there are things that I would change about it. Not even the GMATPrep is a perfect test as many people say that it is not quite up to the current actual GMAT. I will not even say that the Veritas test is an accurate predictor of your score on test day. But it is a good test.
What I will say is that you can use this as a learning experience, rather than one that causes frustration. It is quite possible that things will happen on test day that are different from what you expect and here is your chance to show that you can handle whatever comes up.
Here are a few observations:
First, last time I took the GMAT, last March, I was keeping track very carefully throughout the verbal. I only got 10 critical reasoning questions and had 17 sentence correction. The sentence correction where throughout the entire section but they were especially at the end when I was thinking of at least a few more CR to get up to, say 12 CR. But no it was sentence correction after sentence correction. So that is something that can happen on the actual test.
Second, unless the GMAT has made a change and not told anyone about it it is possible on the actual exam to get 3 Reading Comp passages - in which case the breakdown would be something like 5 questions - 5 questions - and 4 questions - and that is what you had on the Veritas exam. The purpose of 4 passages on the GMAT is for one of these shorter passages to be experimental and for the entire passage and all questions not to count. So if you get four passages this is probably the case, if you get three passages I would bet that all three count.
Third, It is true that the Critical Reasoning and Reading Comp are pretty tough on the Veritas test, but if you read the reports of people who have taken the actual test recently many of them say that the RC and CR on test day is tougher than on the GMATprep or Official Guide.
Fourth, the distribution of questions is not random on the GMAT, but it can seem to be. It is possible to have one type of question over-represented in the first 10. I am not sure that 7 of the first 10 being critical reasoning is typical but this is not outside the realm of possibility. I had a tutoring student who claims to have gotten 3 reading comp passages in a row and that would be pretty strange!
So that is what I would say, take it all in stride. I think that each of us wants every practice test to be an affirmation of the progress we are making, but then the different tests score differently and behave differently and maybe some particular test we take will not be an affirmation but a learning experience.
Perhaps the strategy is to stretch the boundaries and prepare people for what might happen on test day?
