A good break to prevent burnout can be helpful. It should be expected that you'll be slower getting back into things, but the small regression can go a long way in aiding future potential growth.

Earlier in the month I took a week straight off and actually had a social life, and while my first "back into it" PT was a few points lower than my average, the week that followed had some of my strongest/most focused studying yet. Just a week of refocused drilling really helped me smash a plateau I had been stuck at for a month. [This is all anecdotal and you'll know your body and mind best]

Right, I didn't mean to intimate that LG was harder than normal- it was very on par for the most recent tests. My struggle there was a result of my own silly early inference mistakes.

You're right that the rest could have played to my strengths on question types- If I remember correctly there was a dearth of parallel reasoning at least.

At any rate, I am used to circling 4 or 5 per LR and a few RC questions to come back to. This whole test I maybe circled 5 or 6 total, and I felt very comfortable and confident doing that. I was expecting to over circle out of an abundance of caution.

I hate to be the contrarian about this, but I found the LR and RC much much easier than almost any of the score of practice tests I've taken. I truly hope -12 is the 170 mark, because my LG will be anywhere in the range of -2 to a nightmare -5 (as opposed to the -0 or -1 we all work so hard for and in turn come to expect...). But truthfully I think the test balanced itself out well, as it's wont to do, and don't see much reason for it being atypical to the ordinary -10/-11 170.

The good news is if we all bombed the LG, it's like none of did ... right? (Plz based curve)

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty confident it was the real one that I bombed. It could be a pleasant surprise in a few week, but im not holding out hope.

The format was very typical of the most recent tests, whereas the experimental one seemed like all the games were the same, and almost overly simplistic.

I had an experimental LG. I'm pretty sure I got perfect on it with 9 or 10 minutes to spare. I then proceeded to struggle mightily through the real one as my last section.

If o had to do poorly on a section im glad it was my last. And im still hopeful for the 170 range since I found the rest to be a breeze.

I'm so glad I set the bar so high. LG was the least of my worries, but I went in prepared and i guess you never know when your best section will kick you in the head. Feel blessed that head kick will be less devastating to me than others.