730 Q49 V40 IR 3! How bad is it?

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730 Q49 V40 IR 3! How bad is it?

by nikhil.jones.s » Thu Feb 20, 2014 8:54 pm
Hi all,

I just gave my GMAT yesterday and scored a decent 730.

IR-3 - 23rd Percentile.
Q-49 - 81st Percentile.
V-40 - 90th Percentile.
Overall-730 - 96th Percentile.

Yes, exactly, the pain point is 3 in IR. Graphs and DI have never been a problem. In fact the low score was very surprising and annoying. I cannot recollect to have scored as low as 3 in any of the mocks that I gave.

Anyway, the main reason why I am posting this is because I want to know the impact of IR score on my application. I am planing to apply in 2016/2017 after a good 2-3 years of experience.
The schools that I am looking at are:
ISB, INSEAD, NUS, IE, IESE, Columbia, HAAS, Duke, NTU, Tepper, Booth, Darden, Tuck.

Just to fill in the experts with a brief description of my profile,
I have an decent profile with a good number of extra curricular activities and leadership accolades, including an international exchange program. However, I have a very poor gpa from my undergrad college. I'm currently working in EMC as an Associate consultant, working primarily on Big Data Analytics.

Thanks in advance. :)

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by InterviewBay2 » Tue Feb 25, 2014 11:33 pm
A 730 is FANTASTIC! Not decent. Congrats! It is safe to assume that the main GMAT score is and will remain the most important one. (It is after all the score considered when evaluating rankings, for example). That's not to say that a low IR score won't have some affect. Well, although a middling score won't get noticed, a particularly low score (like a 3) will always get noticed. So you got to think 1. How are you going explain it? 2. How are you going make up for it. It is still less important than the overall main score, but when you score so low, they will expect an explanation. Like "I was unprepared because of xx and yy" and then show some work-related POSITIVE things that PROVE that you have the skills that the IR section tests. So like "In work we do xx and yy." I mean everyone is allowed one weakness, and yours isn't a huge one, so with a bit of fancy writing, and a good application, I would hope that they would not make a big deal of it.
Good Luck!