Beat The GMAT a GMAT & MBA community

Hi Everyone,
I have been a silent observer of this via RSS feeds so far.

Here's where I stand with GMAT. I'm making this fairly lengthy to outline where I am with GMAT and my dreams to pursue a top b-school.

I started preparing for the GMAT in September of 2011 after the work pressure had died off. Unfortunately, I cheaped out from taking an online course and I wanted to basically be a hero by proving to myself that I could do it by myself. So, I started off by finishing off the Manhattan Guides and doing the problems in the book (didn't do the OG problems that come with almost every chapter in MGMAT books). My intention here was to cover off all the fundamentals and dive into the OG/2nd editions of verbal and quant that would help to point out my flaws in the end. I had scheduled my first GMAT exam towards the end of December of 2011. It wasn't until the 2nd week of November when I picked up the pace but I realized it was a bit late since I had to do 6 MGMAT CAT exams in 6 days while working full-time. I ended up taking about 3 MGMAT CATs in 4 days and scored 580, 560 and 620. I made myself believe that these CAT simulations were not accurate and that I would be able to do better in the actual exam with the "exam-mindset" (really bad idea). I had taken the GMATPrep practice tests but the focus was only to cover off the quant to see how well I could do. I didn't really use GMATPrep to gauge where I was in terms of my actual performance. I ended up with a 550 on GMAT.

So, I geared up for the second attempt starting in the second week of January 2012. This time around I went over the fundamentals in all the MGMAT guides that I missed and did the problem sets from OG/2nd edition verbal and quant after all the chapters. I used the same strategy for doing CAT exams by putting them off to the last 10 days before the exam. This time around I did all the MGMAT CAT exams and scored an average of 640 (one of the exams I got 750 but the quant problems and the RC/CR questions were too familiar so this is an outlier but definitely a booster).

My weakest part was verbal although I thought I had mastered SC. I tried to boost my Verbal score that seemed to have capped off at 30 in the last 4 days before the exam. So, I gave the exam on March 9th and ended up with 640 - verbal 32 and quant 47 (could've done better here but I let my ego get in the way and spent too much time on one of the questions because of which I did badly on the last 2 questions where I rushed through them and panicked).

I feel like I am finally getting the hang of gmat, but I know I need to master verbal. I can still get into average B-schools with the score and my work experience of close to 4 years but I really want to target the top-tier schools.

Is it worthwhile to seriously attempt to score above 700? Third-time retake might be viewed a bit negatively as well. Would this be reflected on my profile when viewed by the MBA admissions?

Thanks for reading folks! Any perspectives or feedback will be appreciated.