Does hardwork pay off?

Well, I gave GMAT recently, Sept 13, 2013, and I scored decent 690, with 38 on Verbal. I faced a lot of challenges like you with Verbal, while preparing, specially SC.
Here are a few things I did for verbal preparation:

Used all official material, that really helps. Got the GMAT Official guide 13th Edition, and work through it. The questions here are retired questions from past tests, and gave me a sense, that there are a few specific things that get repeated, like say parallelism in sentences and noun verb agreement. Once you know these by doing real GMAT questions, you just prepare whats important and appears in GMAT.

Post Official guide I grabbed Official Verbal review 2nd edition, since I needed help on verbal as well. I worked through them solving all questions, and looking up the given solution wherever I went wrong.

Lastly I bought 3 paper tests from GMAC, again with retired test, doing these tests in simulation timed environment gives the closet approximation of your real GMAT Score, except that you will notice that there are more questions in each paper test then real test. This means you actually have more time/ question in on THE DAY, and get slightly higher then paper test. I was getting 670-680 on GMAC paper tests (12 tests that I did), and scored 690 on real day, since there is more time then what you have prepared yourself for !

Hope that helps !

Ankit

Look at which area you are weak at: SC, RC or CR.
If you are doing ok in all 3, maybe it's a timing issue or stamina. In which case do a lot of timed practice and do blocks of lots of different types of questions to build up stamina.

I would say hard work does pay off. Never give up hope in yourself.

I am not quite sure will the 4th try reflect badly on my academic ability

Hey Buddy, I gave Gmat yesterday and got exactly same score as you did and with exact same breakup. unfortunately quitting is not an option for me and I strongly believe this score is just not true representative of my potential. I think I know the reason why it happened to me, its not that I was bad in English, I was scoring consistently in late 30's and even 40 in verbal, in Gmat Prep. I think the main reason was mental fatigue on a particular day and then I decided to guess a RC passage completely as it was a long 2 page passage on some historic cultural society. I think that's what started my downfall in verbal section. Any-ways past is past and I am planning to give a shot in mid November once more with a custom study plan. I can share more details regarding what I plan to do this time around if you are interested.
On another point... well if this assuage your worries, I am 29 and planning to do MS and just have 1-2 schools in mind, as per my research the mean age is around 28-29 if you want to get in MS fin for LBS. All I know is I am getting there for sure..no matter what..

Hi Nikhil

Thank you for writing this post. It helps me a lot to see there is at least someone in the similar shoes. Do you want to exchange contact at least so that we (or actually I) can motivate each other?

Thank you

It has been a while since I log in here. I did retake the 4th one and get the score that I wanted. I has to thank gmatclub for introducing a great studying partner. Couldn't make that target without group study.