Thanks for the quick reply! I have scheduled another test for mid December; I'm getting a time extension accommodation and I believe that this will greatly increase my score to, at the very least, "average" for my target schools. With that said, I find standardized tests wholly irrelevant and I think it is hard to believe that, given a solid holistic profile, an adcom would reject a candidate purely based on the performance of a standardized test. Some really genius people are terrible at these tests and, on the contrary, some really unintelligent people score excellently.

Given your consulting experience, isn't there a very real opportunity to sell myself to the adcom and at the same time share my perspective on how grossly irrelevant these silly tests are?

I was previously a PhD candidate for philosophy and I can safely say the competitiveness of graduate philosophy programs are exponentially beyond those of business, law, or medical school. Admission rates for even mediocre programs are single digits, with only spots for approximately 8-15 candidates per year. Most programs don't even want to see a standardized test scores and they evaluate the candidates based on letters of rec and writing sample. Would it be behoove of my to include a fairly short technical paper in my package? Is it often that adcoms are willing to disregard the gmat, regardless of score, or do they suffer from a severe case of myopia?

I really appreciate your response!