Hi Kay.
My take is that you just haven't done enough yet to hit your score goal. You need to really get good at handling the various types of quant questions and you need to figure out how GMAT verbal works.
To drive your quant score higher, your best bet is to go over your practice tests and see what types of questions took the most time or otherwise gave you the most trouble. Then focus on each type, one at a time, learning to handle that type and them moving onto the next. I mean, learn about how to handle the type and do dozens of questions of that type until you are totally expert in handling those types of questions. Then move onto the next type.
One decent resource for that type of quant work is Target Test Prep. Another good source of practice questions is this website,
https://bellcurves.com. You can access the quant question bank by setting up a practice account.
When you are doing practice questions, while doing them timed some of the time can be useful, for the most part you need to start off doing them UNTIMED, focusing on learning how to get RIGHT answers. Getting wrong answers in two minutes each is virtually useless. Once you learn to get right answer you can speed up.
On verbal, you seem to be flailing. Maybe you are choosing answer choices that sound good or maybe you are using strategies that are semi useful but not great. So sometimes what you are doing works, and sometimes it doesn't.
Let's get something clear here. The verbal section of the GMAT is not a grammar test or a high school level test. It's a fairly sophisticated test of reasoning skills, and in order to score high on it you need to give the questions a certain respect. Going for answers that sound right is not really going to work out. As a matter of fact, the CR questions, for instance, often have answer that sound GREAT, but have little to nothing to do with the question being asked.
So in order to score higher on verbal you need to really learn to see what's going on in the questions and answer choices. For starters you could work on the verbal questions in the Official Guide, seeking to understand why each wrong answer choice is wrong and each right answer choice is right. Doing that is going to take way longer than two minutes per question at first.
Also, you can go over every verbal question in your past practice tests to see what it is that you needed to see in order to get them right.
For any verbal question that you don't get right you could ask yourself, "What did I do that resulted in my choosing the wrong answer choice?" "What did I need to do differently in order to choose the right answer choice?" and "What did I need to see in order to get this one right?"
Just by handling verbal with more care and attention to the questions and what you are doing you could conceivably increase your total score by 100 points. Then get a few more quant questions right and you will be set.
