JoelCairo wrote:
Hi Jennifer,
So I took the GMAT yesterday, and scored better than I ever had on any practice tests (44Q and 51V, so a 760). Mostly I'm thrilled, but I'm a little nervous about that Quant score for the programs I'm targeting (top 20, a couple top 10s). I've heard about the apocryphal 80/80 percentile cut-off for top programs, so will a 66th %ile Quant kill me if I'm 99th %ile Verbal?
By way of background, I'm from a Humanities undergrad (graduated 6 years ago). Classic "poet" profile. Since then I've demonstrated a bit of Quant chops, I got an A in a graduate-credit level stats class I took via Continuing Education at a very fancy local university last year, and was asked back to serve as a grader the semester after. So I have something to show on the quant front, but it's still pretty thin. Not sure if it can offset that Quant score in the eyes of a top 10 adcom.
The Math 44 frankly wasn't that abnormally low for me. I had a couple practice tests up in the 88th and 77th percentiles, but I also had some where I bombed out and ended up below the 50th. Needless to say, math is not my strength. The verbal, though, has never been a problem. I've consistently been scoring in the 99th percentile on all CATs since the diagnostic, so I have no doubt that I could boost my current overall score by retaking if I were to do more math studying.
I just wonder if I'm crazy to even consider retaking the test, and investing yet more time into the GMAT, rather than spending that time on the rest of my app. Opportunity costs, trade-offs etc etc.
Any advice? Not sure I have it in me to retake the GMAT....
Thx
Unfortunately, I do believe you need to retake the GMAT to boost the Quant score. I know this seems crazy, but these programs are so quant based that they need to know that you can handle the workload. Many programs will use your top Quant score and top Verbal score, regardless of whether you achieved these in the same test, so if your Verbal score drops a bit next time, you'll have nothing to worry about.