Planning to Retake - First attempt at GMAT 610

Hi All,

I have explored the forums here on GMATClub and the GMAT club tests and practice material. But to be honest, I haven't really contributed much at all on forums here.

I thought of sharing my GMAT experience here and was looking for suggestions/advice on how I can go about improving my score.

I started preparing for GMAT around mid-September. I was looking to give GMAT around Mid-December to have a shot at B-school deadlines.I gave a mock MGMAT test on which I scored 580 (Q41, V31).I knew my weak area was Quant and that I needed to work on it. So I started out with the MGMAT study guides for Quant and covered all of them.

Later I even reviewed the GMAT CLUB match book thoroughly as was suggested often on these forums. I did find it quite useful especially for some topics of Quant.

Parallely for Verbal, I signed up for E-GMAT's verbal course as I wanted to improve my accuracy on SC and CR. Since I had attended one of their free webinars and liked the approach, I went ahead and signed up for their Verbal online program. This helped me consolidate my Verbal scores.

For practice of Quant/Verbal, I basically covered OG 2016 and questions from GMAT club. I signed up for the GMAT question of the DAY here and would definitely try and solve the daily question. If not I would atleast make sure to understand the solution.

I registered for the GMAT date of Dec 18.

Mocks:

I only gave a couple of GMAT Club Quant CATS and one Verbal CAT.

Then I just did the two GMATprep Mock tests and following are my scores:

GMATPREP1 : Q44, V40 (Total: 690)
GMATPREP2 : Q49, V35 ( Total: 690) - Messed up my timing on Verbal else I could have crossed 700.

Then came test day. I just about managed to finish the AWA section in the nick of time. The IR section went reasonably fine ( got a score of 5).
Then started the Quant section; I was ok with the first few questions and marked the questions confidently. Then came a couple of tricky DS questions, where I thought I made some educated guesses as I did not want to end up with a lot of questions at the end with very little time. As I went on, I was getting some easy questions in between, which made me realize whether I had got some incorrect questions earlier in the section
I think my surprise and real shock was when I reached the last 10 questions and I still had around 20 m ins to do it. That had never happened to me on Quant in a Mock before. Although it was good from a time perspective, I kind of had the felling that something was not quite right. I finished the section on time and then moved on to Verbal.

Verbal started off well. I thought that my first few questions were correct. Got a couple of RC's in first 15-20 questions, which I think I answered correctly. Towards the end for the last 4-5 questions, I just was left with limited time, so I had to make educated guessed on 2-3 questions.

I was shocked when the scores came up . I got a 610 ( Q40 , V35). I was clearly devastated with my Quant scores. I could not figure what went wrong. Was it that I made some mistakes on relatively easy questions or that I got a bunch of consecutive questions wrong or was it something more fundamental??!!

I was disappointed because my score was way below the scores that I got on my GMATPREP mock tests
I am definitely planning to retake it in 2-3 months time as I feel I can do a lot better.

However I was looking for some advice on how to strengthen my Quant skills and improve my score. More importantly how can I consistently get good scores on my Quant so that I do not have to suffer a similar fate second time around.