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I scored a 159 on my first diag (cold), have been in TestMasters for a month, and just scored a 161 on the second diag.

I improved dramatically on logic games (only did one game fully on the first diag and guessed on the rest of them), but my other sections didn't budge at all. I've been doing 1-3 hours of study per day and am now super concerned that it's not paying off. At what point should I be scoring close to my goal score? I want a minimum of a 170, so a 161 is extremely disheartening and I'm really worried the TestMasters class isn't working. Also, I have a year before I actually apply, so should I push back my test date based on this score?

You've just started to learn how to apply the teachings to the actual timed test. Take a few more and see what happens.

In my experience in the classroom it's very common for students to take their second practice exam after the diagnostic and after weeks of studying and see very little--if any--gains to their score. While this definitely can be a blow to the ego, it actually makes a lot of sense for a couple reasons.

First of all, you likely have lots of material yet to cover, leaving many question types that you may not have learned how to tackle. Hopefully you're recognizing the question types you *have* learned by now and are implementing your newfound skills in those areas, but for the rest, you're still just a babe in the woods.

Second, more practice will help you hone another critical skill which is speed. By your second exam, you may have some good techniques down and your consistency on question types you've practiced may have gone up, but you still need to do way more practice to get the timing just right.

In the course I teach this is super common among students and usually after seeing only small changes between exams 1 and 2, students will then start to really pick up the pace until they start to really soar by the end when they've not only really honed all the killer techniques but also have gotten way better at timing through more practice and speed training.

Update: 3 weeks later and I went from 161 to 165 to 167 to 171 with four and a half weeks until the actual test. Quit my job to study full time and it's clearly paying off. I also think that taking diags under test conditions is extremely helpful — my endurance has improved and I'm getting better and better at actually finishing sections on time.