In my opinion, it would almost certainly be a waste of time for you to retake the exam just to improve your AWA. It is by far the least heavily weighed section of the GMAT, and conventional wisdom is that only a score of 3.5 or below would really hurt your candidacy.

That said, the best thing to do is to contact each admissions department directly. The "above 50 percent" threshold may be merely a preference for some, but a hard rule for others.

You can also contact an admissions consulting firm directly. I've worked a lot with MBAmission, and they give excellent advice. You can sign up for a free 30-min consultation at mbamission.com.

Best of luck!

Hi bhuchat,

I agree with Ceilidh that retaking the GMAT is probably not going to be a requirement for you to apply to any of those Schools. A 720/Q51 is an outstanding performance, and a 4 on the AWA (which is fine) won't hold up your application. My guess is that whoever wrote the text for the "minimum 50th percentiles" section that you read was probably being a bit lazy with the specifics.

As a measure of caution, when you have specific questions on application requirements, you should contact the School(s) in question and ask.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Echoing the earlier comments. One other thought -- if you write compelling admissions essays, my guess is that most departments won't even consider your AWA score. Yes, it would be great if it was higher, but I've always been of the belief that ~4.0 and higher is high enough to never worry about it again.

Good luck!