Caramel,

I would strongly suggest not to speculate on what is lying inside admission officer's head. Who knows you might have some good qualifications that a "first time 720 guy" doesn't have.

Hope for the best instead of speculating. I know a girl who entered into one of the top business schools with a score of 600.

Many times in life we fail to think or remember about some of our nicest achievements. I am sure you would have some good other qualities which are necessary for an MBA enrollment.

Good Luck !!!, Be Positive.

Caramel, gmataspirant is right. MBA admission is more than score driven even though we like to make ourselves believe that a good test score is more than half the battle.

When you look at a school like Stanford, their admit profile shows the range of accepted applicants to be from the low 500s to 800. Of course, a great majority of the accepted applicants are in the upper range.

From my interactions with admission officers at Stanford and Haas, they say they don't care how many times applicants have taken the gmat, however, they say applicants should let them know which score they want them to consider during the evaluation process. To further buttress that point, I used to work with a gal who made it into the Haas / Columbia Executive MBA program and she took the gmat at least 8 times over two years. I kid you not. If you do the math, that's at least $2K to the folks that administer the exam. Anyway, she now works for JPMorgan and is either completing her program right about now or has just completed it.

I wouldn't dwell on retaking the exam though if you think that you cannot significantly improve your score. But whatever you decide to do, I wish you good luck!

Thanks for the encouragement, I'll give it another shot.