Fork in the road: Lopsided 720 (Q44, V45). Retake strategy?

Hi everyone,

First, as this is my first post, many thanks to everyone at GMAT Club for their tremendous helpfulness. This is a fantastic site with invaluable resources and a very supportive community. Although I've been lurking for a while, this forum has been tremendously helpful in trudging through studying.

I'm hoping to get some advice on strategies for retaking (and perhaps whether I should retake) the GMAT. I took my first stab at the exam this past Sunday and although my overall score was over that magical 700 mark, my relatively low quant score (44) is below that even more magical 80% mark. I'll be applying to Wharton, HBS, MIT and the like for matriculation in 2011. I know conventional wisdom says that unless I had an uncharacteristically poor performance on test day, I should focus my efforts on other parts of the application. But since that's relatively far away, I don't know if I can sit tight for so long wondering if I could make a more convincing quant score.

I studied intensively for about three months using primarily MGMAT, the official guides and GMAT Prep versions one and two. Except for about 5 days of verbal, I studied exclusively quant since this was my weakness from the beginning. My score history is below. My strategy was to do practice problems and extensively review mistakes, guesses and slow work. In general, I seem to have issues over-complicating problems, making basic calculation errors, and missing the point of the question.

It's easy for me to spend 7 minutes on a problem (which I of course wouldn't do in a real test), write a page of calculations and come up with an answer that's not one of the choices! I've tried working very slowly through problems using a detailed plan of attack, making my scratch work beautiful, conceptualizing before diving into details, working under timed conditions, and many other strategies. But I just can't seem to find what my problem is.

Score history:

GMATPrep V2, Test #1, Try #1: Q43, V42, Overall 690
Kaplan CAT #1: Q39, V37, Overall 630
GMATPrep V1, Test #1, Try #1: Q?, V?, Overall 710
Kaplan CAT #2: Q35
Kaplan CAT #4: Q47
MGMAT #1: Q40
MGMAT #2: Q41, V40
MGMAT #3: Q46
MGMAT #4: Q42, V40, Overall 680
GMAT Prep V1, Test #2, Try #1: Q42, V37, Overall 650
MGMAT #5: Q43, V45, Overall 720
GMATPrep V2, Test #1, Try #2: Q48, V44, Overall 750
GMATPrep V1, Test #1, Try #2: Q50, V?, Overall 760
GMATPrep V2, Test #1, Try #1: Q48, V40, Overall 720
GMATPrep V1, Test #2, Try #2: Q47, V48, Overall 760
REAL DEAL: Q44, V45, Overall 720

Looking through my scores, I wish I had seen coming my disappointment with my quant score, since my final score was inside my typical range. Oh well. I want to figure out why my three months of studying apparently yielded only a 1 point boost from my diagnostic test at Q43 and real test at Q44. My goal would be to get my quant score to a 49.

A little background on me: I graduated from a top liberal arts college in the US with a BA in Computer Science and International Relations. I did fine in college math classes (A in Calc III, B in Linear Algebra, B in Math Structures) and normally math has been my strong suit. After graduating I worked in quant-heavy product management at a software company for 2 years and for the past 1.5 years have worked at a university in long range planning and budgeting. I think my work experience should be very strong and I could get recommenders to focus on my quantitative skills.

My (evolving, hypothetical) Retake Plan
Based on the fantastic post by hobbit "improving your quant from 44-46 to 50+"

- Sign up with a private tutor who can personally analyze my situation. (I considered a Knewton class, but don't want to invest so much time in basics and in verbal)
- Focus on repetition of basic skills by practicing easier problems
- Review every official problem where I was slow or wrong and find similar simpler problems to build the underlying concepts
- Use the GMATClub tests as my primary base of new difficult practice questions
- Make more extensive use of Kaplan book to build basic skills
- (Perhaps) purchase a book like Jeff Sackmann's Total GMAT Math

Questions for the ever-patient and benevolent GMATClub community:

1) Is retaking with the ambition of going from a Q44 to a Q49 unrealistic given my fairly consistent score history?
2) Any suggestions on how I might fundamentally change my approach such that I actually see improvement? Suggested materials? Thoughts on the strategy above or using a private tutor as opposed to online classes?
3) If I didn't retake, how suspiciously will the schools I'm looking at view my low quant score in the context of a math-ish background? Am I crazy for thinking about retaking?

Many thanks in advance for your comments!