685 GMAT Focus Debrief

­About a month ago, I scored a 685 on the GMAT Focus on my second attempt after scoring a 645 previously. My goal for the second try was to beat a 645, so I am quite happy with how things turned out! 

Section scores:

Q: 82/76th percentile
V: 87/99th percentile
DI: 83/96th percentile

Quant has always been my weakest section, and I always liked to get it out of the way first. On this test, I felt the questions were similar in difficulty to the mocks, and I ended up scoring close to my practice Quant average. One early question tripped me up, which is annoying in hindsight because getting that one right really would've boosted my score. It was a geometry based question involving circles, which is a topic I simply did not alot much study time for unfortunately. Other than that, questions were typical of what I saw while preparing.

Verbal is by far my strongest. I usually finish with around 10-15 minutes left, which gives me ample time to reread any questions I am confused by. The verbal section of this test was very comparable to those of the mocks, although there were a few critical reasoning questions I felt had ambiguous answers. Overall, I got two critical reasoning questions wrong, and one reading comprehension question wrong. On the mocks, I averaged about the same, so nothing too surprising here.

Data Insights on average is my second strongest section, but it's pretty hit or miss in my experience. I find some of the questions, especially the multi-part ones, to be poorly explained sometimes, which of course limits my ability to accurately answer the related questions. The DI section on my first attempt, for example, had some really objectively confusing questions, and I scored much lower on DI for that attempt. This time, thankfully, I found that the questions were much more straightforward conceptually, and I actually finished with around 5 minutes left. 

I studied for around 120 hours across 3 months, and exclusively used TTP. I strongly recommend them; there are thourough overviews of every type of question and topic you may come across on the test, and a surplus of examples and practice tests flushed throughout. Despite the immense amount of material, TTP breaks lessons down into manageable pieces, which made it easy for me to relearn concepts I hadn't seen in years. Thank you guys for reading! Feel free to reach out with questions, and best of luck.­