First attempt 670 - Retake advice needed

[thesal]

Hi everyone,

after two months of prep (approx. 25-30h/week), I scored a 670 (Q44, V38) on the real exam. For once I'm happy that I surpassed my minimum goal of 650, on the other hand however, I would really like to score 700+. And I think it is a realistic goal given that I scored a 700 on GMAT Prep and 690 on MGMAT earlier this week.

My mock scores were:
MGMAT #1: 670 (Q44, V37) --- 4 weeks before exam
MGMAT #2: 690 (Q45, V38) --- 1 week before exam
GMAT Prep # 1: 700 (Q48, V38) --- 3 days before exam

(Yes, I did only take three mocks tests, and I should probably have taken more...)

Clearly, the quant section was my problem today as I scored on par with practice scores in verbal. Since most people say that MGMAT quant is more difficult than real GMAT quant, I thought I would be in the Q46-48 range and the Q48 on GMAT Prep confirmed that. What happened today though was that my timing got a little off towards the end... I had been 1-2 minutes ahead of schedule until question 30 or so, which was quite uncommon, as I usually tend to be more like 1-2 behind schedule. Moreover, the questions felt very manageable, I guessed 3-4 but knowledge-wise there were no huge surprises for me. Then towards the end I suddenly didn't have enough time for the last 3-4 questions and thus I had to guess the last 3 questions. This probably hurt my score a lot and turned what could have been a 690 or even 700 into a 670. Verbal went smooth just like in the practice tests, no timing issues, finished about 2min early.

Now, I'm determined to take the GMAT again in a month or so and I would like to ask the experts for some advice on how to go from this 670 to 700+. My goal is to get a SURE Q48 and ideally also raise verbal to 40 or more.

What do you suggest?
Should I just continue as I have been studying, but do more practice tests in real test conditions with emphasis on timing? This would be helpful for quant, but how to improve verbal?
What is a good source for tough verbal questions?

Moreover, should I get a tutor?
I don't think taking a course at this point still makes sense as I have gone through the MGMAT guides very carefully and grasped all concepts (of course still have certain areas of weakness and I will continue to work on them).
I also fancy with the Economist offer as it comes with individual tutoring sessions as well as a bunch of practice problems.

Some more details on how I have been studying so far...

Quant: My quant skills were not really great when I started off, I deliberately didn't take a diagnostic in quant since I knew I would probably be absolutely demotivated by my bad performance without any preparation. So I knew right from the beginning that I would have to put a lot of effort into quant...
Here's what I did:
- Went through all MGMAT strategy guides (4th edition) twice, took notes, did all the problem sets and completed all OG questions at the end of each book (used Manhattan's Companion to verify solutions, found these explanations much more helpful than OG explanations)
- Kept an error log and reviewed it
- Got the GMAT Club tests and completed approx. half of the 600 / 700 math questions (stopped doing 500 level questions after around 50 questions as I consistently got 100% correct)
- Went through GMAT Club Mathbook and noted down all formulas and short cuts, tricks etc.

Verbal: Although I'm not a native speaker, my English is fairly good as I have been reading and writing a lot in English. I scored a V35 on MGMAT without any preparation. I then decided to focus on SC as this seemed to be my weakness. Watched all of Thursday's with Ron SC videos (tremendously helpful!! Thank you very much, Ron!) and went through the Manhattan SC guide and did approx. 60-70% of the SC questions in the OG. This increased my accuracy in SC to 90%+ and I can solve most questions in <45-60sec. CR wasn't much of a problem either, I sticked to the strategies mentioned in Manhattan CR (5th edition) and my accuracy here is about 85%. Within the verbal section, RC is definitely my weakness, here my accuracy is only around 50-60% and I often take too long to read the passage. Definitely think there is still room for improvement to get a V40+.

Going with the Manhattan Strategy Guides definitely was the best decision! Even though I worked with the 4th edition, the strategies and explanations are fantastic and I feel that knowledge-wise I'm well-equipped to score 700+, just need to master test taking strategies and time management better.
I would really appreciate any comments, recommendations or tips you have on how I should study for the next 4-6 weeks until my retake. Thank you very much in advance and keep up the great work, Manhattan Team! :)

[melvyntherep]

Where did you end up applying?

I took it too and just scored 670 on my first try (first real one was 8 years ago and I got 690 on the old format) but never got above 610 on MGMAT CATs. My GMAT prep score was 650 at its highest.

I want to retake it in order to get into a top 10 school.

got thrown off in the Math (timing issues) and did well on Verbal (although I believe I could have gotten higher on verbal too if I had not gotten a tough RC on stars and dark matter universe cosmos stuff!

[sirdac1984]

When you take the test, there is a deviation of +30. Just something to keep in mind. GMAT verbal may be harder than ManhattanGMAT verbal. I would do all the practice questions in the OG13.