700 (Q49 V36) experience + Retake advice please!

I have been a passive but grateful user of this forum for the last five months, and now that I have taken my first GMAT I want to share my experience for others’ benefit and hopefully get some good tips on how to prepare for a second take.

Let me start by saying that I am overall satisfied with a 700, but I am set on trying to improve my score (more on this later).

My background: non-native speaker, from Europe. 4y international work experience in different sectors, now consulting.

Preparation:
5-6 months, roughly 1h per day during weekdays + 5-10 hours in the weekend (with CATs in the last 2 months). Since the beginning I knew my very weak area was Quant, and 95% of my study time was dedicated to that… so hopefully I can give some hope and motivation for the ‘Poets’ out there like me who freak out as soon as they see a root… with hard work, you can reach your goal (Q49 might not be an amazing score for many, but I am extremely satisfied with that). Really guys, when I started my study I could not remember basic exponents rules etc…

Resources used:

• OG 13
• MGMAT Math Foundations: my savior! I have spent at lest the whole first month on this, but was worth it! It may seem a lot of content when you start, but understanding well the basic concepts will help you move thru the Quant guides quicker
• MGMAT Quant guides…twice! Skipped some of the advanced contents
• MGMAT Verbal guides: I have read them all quickly, but SC is the only one which I have actually ‘studied’

Tests:

• 25/1 GMAT Prep1 710 Q45 V41
• 8/2 MGMT Cat 1 640 Q43 V35
• 22/2 MGMT Cat 2 680 Q44 V38
• 1/3 GMAT Prep2 710 Q48 V38
• 8/3 MGMT Cat3 670 Q41 V40
• 15/3 GMAT Prep3 720 Q46 V44
• 22/3 GMAT Prep4 660 Q45 V35 (bad !!!)
  
  
• 24/3 Real GMAT 700 Q49 V36

Debriefon the real test:

Quant: clearly I am happy with the result, 49 is the highest score I have ever reached. I did not have the feeling that I was doing particularly well during the exam though… I think I might have been lucky with my educated guesses!
Strategies/tips that worked for me:

• Focus on being ‘perfect’ on the easy/medium questions and key basic content
• Do not stress about very complicated/long questions: they take long to learn and too long to solve during the test
• Spent a bit extra time on the first 5-10 Qs
• Catched-up with time during the rest of the exam with quick educated guesses or complete guesses on questions that seemed to hard (still, it is hard to pass on questions without trying hard… but at the end is worth saving time... I also want to improve on this!)

Verbal: the sad note of the exam… not sure what went wrong, I felt I was doing ok…probably a few too many SC errors… time management could have been better, normally in simulations I did not have to rush on the last Qs, while on test day I had to. I feel I can always solve a Verbal questions, thus I never really guess here… A few tips from me:

• RC is usually my forte. Personally, I really engage with the passage and read it thoroughly, taking notes (I don’t go back to them, but it helps memorizing and understanding the passage). Then, I can almost answer Qs without reading again, or at least I know exactly where to look for the answer
• CR and SC: no particular advice… for SC, I try to follow the standard approach of looking for errors in the stem before checking answers, and then trying to split answer choices to leave the decision between 2 or 3 options

AWA: Not much to say, standard flawed argument. Only advice: try not to write too much, but rather ensure to have enough time at the end to review and correct mistakes (Still waiting for the results)

IR (6): Not a great score mainly because my first two questions were very long (or it was just me?) to solve and I had to almost guess blindly the last 3-4.
Good way to warm-up your ‘quant side’ of the brain…

Other test aspects:

• Food & drinks: very important to recharge! I went for Gatorade + Sneaker + banana… my only problem is try not to drink too much, as by the end of both sessions I had a very annoying urge for the toilette!
• PAD + markers: I found this very, very annoying compared to pen and paper:
  The tip of the marker was very big thus I had to pay much more attention to handwriting. And it was getting dry every moment I was not using it, thus I wasted many seconds trying to make it work properly again
  
• -The pad was not very clean, thus writing from past users was somehow distracting on the sheet background
  
• -I wrote my timings on the front page but had to switch back to it every time I wanted to check, wasting time… any advice on this?

Retake: please advice!!!
700 is not a bad score but is not competitive at top schools. While I will not stress myself if I do not improve it, I want to give it another try to make my application more attractive (I consider my profile average on the other aspects).

Now I need to make a study plan for the next 4-6 weeks and would really benefit from the gmatclub community and experts advice on strategy and resources to use

Objective: maintain my score in Quant while improving Verbal

Strategy/material:

• Quant: How to ensure I do not ‘loose ‘it? (Q49 is my best score so far)
• Verbal: any specific source you recommend to reach 90+ percentile (I already scored above 40 in many on my CATs)
• Which materials should I use for studying? Going through MGMT guides again or new ones?
• Which exercises/CATs to use? I feel I benefit a lot from official content, while I am skeptical about MGMT CATs… but I have already finished exercises in OG13 and the 4 GMAT Prep test!

Finally on retaking:

PROS:

• I know I can score much higher in Verbal
• I had a bad test day experience with the pad… not a big difference, but maybe I can gain 10-20points by being more prepared
• I will have a better mental attitude from already knowing the test center environment + being less stressed (worst case, I have a 700 in the bag)
• I have time (plan to apply next fall)
• I don’t have a profile that stands out, I assume some extra GMAT points could be helpful for top schools)

CONS:

• I am scared I could go much worse in Quant (again, I feel I have been lucky). Actually on this: how would it impact my application slightly improving total score (710,720…) but with a lower Quant score? (My profile is not Quanty at all and I believe it is important for me to show Adcom I can handle quant)
• Time: need to put on hold school research/mba events etc for another month
• If the result is less than 700, schools will see it (is this a problem at all?)

Thanks a lot for reading this and for any comment/answer, looking forward to them!!!