You in fact earned those questions!
One note though: The 700-800 "label" that's on the questions isn't, of course, the actual difficulty level of the questions, as only the Q+V scores together are actually in the 200 to 800 range. We use these labels because students are familiar with them and understand that "700-800" means
really hard, 600-700 means
medium to harder, and so on.
In terms of the underlying algorithm, each question has been tested and is rated according to a very precise degree. You just can't see that information because it's deep in the algorithm (and it's actually more complex than a single number). You can think of these labels as giving you the relative difficulty level. There are four "buckets"—300 to 500, 500 to 600, 600 to 700, and 700 to 800.
You earned a Q49 (out of 51), so you absolutely should have seen questions labeled 7-8 pretty much the entire time.
Your V score is a bit lower (but still very good). You spent most of the section in the 85th+ percentile—and at that level, you would again expect questions labeled in that 7-8 range. You did have a bit of a drop at the end of the section. The GMAT is what's known as a "Where you end is what you get" test. Since your score dropped a bit at the end, the final score was lower than your average performance across the entire section. This is weird, yes—but it's how question-adaptive tests work.
(Note: There is more of a penalty for timing out at the end and not answering a question than there is for answering the question but getting it wrong. In future, make sure to answer every question, even if you have to guess.)
In terms of the content—yes, our quant is really hard. (So is our IR.) We're basically trying to overtrain you for the real test. Many students tell me that they think our quant is harder than the real thing. Many students also tell me that they think the official practice test quant is
easier than the real thing. That's not good for training purposes—it means you're more likely to crash and burn when you get to the real thing. I want to train you harder than the real thing so that you're really ready.
I had to even pause and do question because every question seemed to take a lot of time, and my priority was on getting it right rather than solving it in time.
I just want to address this. Many people get sucked into spending too much time on quant, and then running out of time and seeing their score drop at the end of the section. This is really bad, since Where You End Is What You Get. So we're also trying to put you in the position of having to guess in order to get through the section—because it's super important to train yourself to let go and move on when you do get stuck.
To that end, I strongly recommend
never pausing your practice tests again. Instead, do what you would want to do if you find yourself in this stressful situation on the real test: let go, pick an answer, and move on. You just spent a few hours training yourself to do the opposite of what you would want to do on the real thing. Next time, practice making the decisions you would want to make on the real thing.
You might be thinking that you won't see any quant on the real thing that can cause you to get into this much trouble. Maybe you won't—I hope you won't! But you will likely see harder things than you saw on the official practice test. And you will know that the official test really counts—that adds a level of anxiety that you can't replicate on practice tests (since you know they don't count). And anxiety can cause you to forget things or to mess things up...so you are also more likely for that reason to see something on the real test that you can't do. And you don't get a pause button on the real thing. So practice what you would want to do when/if that happens on the real test.
Good luck!
