Nate, congratulations on the 30-point jump! A 327 puts you in strong shape for most graduate and business school programs.

What you said about not getting by with tricks is worth highlighting for anyone reading this who's trying to figure out how to approach Quantitative Reasoning. A lot of students plateau because they've learned just enough of a topic to recognize the familiar version of a question, but not enough to handle it when the question is constructed differently. The students who break through usually do what you described. They go back to the foundations, learn what the concept actually is and why the technique works, and then build the skill up from there. That sounds slower, but it ends up being faster, because the score gains stick.

The same principle applies to Verbal Reasoning. Vocabulary, reading depth, careful attention to argument logic, and the habit of engaging closely with what a passage is actually saying matter together. Treating Verbal as the section you'll figure out at the end tends to leave points on the table. It sounds like you balanced both sections, which is usually what gets people into the 320+ range.

For anyone else reading this: the takeaway from Nate's experience is that he did the work, and he built deep skill from the ground up. That's the durable path. Learn the concept, practice the topic until your accuracy is consistently high, and then move on. The depth is what produces the score gains.

Well done, Nate.