all the 700 club members please read and advice

Hi all,

I just took the GMAT today, and yet another disappointment....
580 Q47 V23
I was really low after the test, and don't know what to do next... I want to retake the test, Am I THAT bad in verbal?!

This is my second attempt. My first attempt was in 2002 and I scored
610 Q47 V27. My studying was not very consistent during the first try, and I barely finished all the OG verbal questions.

Alittle background info, I'm 25 currently work in Toronto, Canada for a private financial software firm. I graduated in 2003 from U of Toronto with a bachelor degree in computer engineering.

After my first attempt I swore to get a higher score into the 700s, and I also realized that my weakness is in Verbal. So for this second attempt, first I joined GMAT club, the awesome GMAT community and I am inspired by many members and by many successful stories. Then I went ahead purchased all the prep material I can think of:

OG10 + OG11 (I didn't get the OG11 Verbal book since I heard that all the questions can be found in the OG 10), PR2005, KP2005, KP800, KP verbal + math, PR verbal +math, Manhattan SC book. I even signed up for the GMAX online course, and finished the course with some great improvements. I also found the 1000SC/RC/CR documents.

For the last 2 month, I went hardcore on verbal. On average I worked on GMAT 3 hours a day, and went through ALL the verbal questions in OG 10 + OG 11, took a note of the question I got wrong, then studied the explanations and redo the wrong questions again. After that, I started to work on the 1000 SC/CR/RC documents, and did about 300 questions in each DOCs. During the day I studied GMAT forum for the explanation of the verbal questions.

About 2 weeks before the test, my accuracy in verbal was consistent at about 70%. In order to get my hands on more real GMAT questions, I downloaded all 3 sets of GMAT paper tests. These were great, and ALOT of questions weren't found any where in any OGs. I finished the verbal sections of these test with careful timing.

I've taken the following as practice tests:

Oct 19 PP1: 570 Q47 V22
Nov 26 PP2: 740 Q47 V44
Dec 4 GMAT prep1: 570,
Dec 19 GMAT prep2: 770! Q51 V44

I didn't do the PR and KP review tests, as I was trying to make the mod tests as close to the real GMAT as possible; however, I did work through KP800 and KP review for math questions, they were good!

On G-day, AWA went through real smooth, given that I didn't even practice, and just memorized templates, I was able to get 3 good points with example for each essay.

Math:
I got stumped on the 2nd question. It was a tough counting method question. I must have spent over 3 minutes just to make sure I got it right. I've also got 2 or 3 complicated word problems regards to numbers of 25c, 10c, 5c coins and the total amount ratios... Overall I finished math on time and since I solved some pretty hard questions, I felt pretty confident about the whole sections.

Verbal:
I tried to spend enough time in the first 10 questions to make sure they were correct. I got a RC science passage about the body characters of alpine deers on question 4. It wasn't that bad; however, later I found the CR questions were alot harder than OG and there were only few SC questions with obvious errors. I thought I must have done well, since the questions were tough, but I guess that wasn't the case. I ended up spending too much time doing POE to narrow it down, and had to guess the last 7 questions.

After I finished the test, I was pretty sure I screwed this one up, and then 580 appeared on the screen...

What did I do wrong? How I can improve my verbal score? was it not enough practice? Not enough time or I'm just not good at taking GMAT? I'm really puzzled, after spending that much effort preparing...

Any 700 club members out there, please give me some advice. Also Paul, ywilfred, Hjort, banerjeea_98, nocilis, HongHu, sparky, AJB77... If you guys are reading this please give me some advice. I'll be kicking myself in the mean time.

Many thanks!