690 GMAT, High Verbal Low Quant!! RETAKE?

Hi there,

So the 42 in quant is the highest you've achieved? That's probably the biggest drawback, more so than the overall score of 690, given you have some other strengths in your profile. It's a bit of a catch-22 in that, yes, your very strong quantitative skills and experiences should help reassure schools that you CAN handle the quantitative nature of the program. But that said, they would also be surprised to see that you did struggle, relative to other applicants, on the quant portion of the GMAT given your background. But the Masters in Accounting and CPA, CFE and accounting experience are all very strong examples of your quant and financial skills. At this point given how many times you've taken the exam, you probably should just briefly comment in the optional essay that you feel your quantitative ability exceeds what was scored on the GMAT, and detail/remind them of why you feel you have specific quant skills etc.

One comment on your schools list-- it's quite long . Not sure if you've begun working on applications, to see how time consuming each can be. Each has their own essay questions and generally you'll tailor most of the application to each school. Applying to 6 in one round could be a challenge. Just make sure you don't sacrifice quality of the applications for quantity... each app should look like it's the ONLY one you are submitting (because to that school, it IS!). And your recommenders will be potentially writing that many letters as well to a certain degree.

Good luck on the process, keep us posted!

Hiya-- sounds like a more reasonable plan in terms of # of schools.

When you say would this score be 'more of an application killer than retaking and achieving the score...' do you just mean that taking it 5 times could be a negative? If you are considering giving it one more shot and feel you can improve I wouldn't be opposed to that per se; but you've also done it quite a few times so would also feel at this point you can speak in a brief optional essay statement to the reason why you feel the GMAT quant isn't quite the best indicator of your mathematical ability and highlight again all the areas you have demonstrated those skills. I think you're in better shape than if you DIDN'T have all of those quantitative aspects of your background, certainly!