Verbal Confusion. Stuck at V30

Your score actually isn't based on how many questions you get right. In this sense, the GMAT is very different from a traditional exam (like a college final). It's true that people with higher scores may get a few more questions right, but getting more questions right doesn't cause you to get a higher score. For instance, I recently took an official GMAT and intentionally missed 12 Verbal questions, and got a 38 on Verbal (85th percentile).

Instead, your score is based on the difficulty level you've reached by the time the test ends. The first 10 questions do matter, since the difficulty changes more with each missed/correct question at the beginning of the test. That means that it's easier to quickly improve your score (or for your score to quickly drop) at the beginning than at the end. However, that means nothing if you can't stay at that level the whole way through to the end. If you can't sustain that performance, it doesn't matter whether you did well at the beginning. Likewise, even if you do poorly at the beginning, you still have time to recover.