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Dear Jon,

It is a pity that I activated this topic again.. seems every year someone has this problem.

I am a Chinese candidate, my undergraduate background is normal, I have two bachelors from a non-top Chinese university (an very average school) with 75% grades(2.5-2.7 in GPA i guess). And entrepreneur experience during undergraduate study (that's part of the reason for low gpa)

Also I had a master's degree from an university in UK(Rank 20-30 in uk), and proceed first class grades.

I have 2.5 years experience with small scale (less than 10ppl) leadership experience, project experience and oversea (europe) work experience in a f500 company. Really normal background, if i have to say some unique maybe will be i have some extracurricular activities activities like president of employee committee, member of a rock band, etc.

I aim on Oxford, but the nightmare is, I got 700 on my GMAT with IR of 2.. I think this is not competitive among Chinese candidates at all.. But I would still like to ask your experience if this low IR will have a big impact on me. If i decide two take another gmat exam i will not be able to apply for round 2, round 3 sounds like a less favored choice. And I am not sure if i can do better on overall score for next attempt..

Thanks.

Hi everyone,

Since the IR has been in place for a few years now, is there an update of how important those scores are?

For reference here are my scores from Manhattan Prep practice exams:
Test No Overall Score IR score Source
2 620 3.03 Manhattan
3 640 2.47 Manhattan

Is 8 still the maximum one can score in IR?

I'm new to the forum hence I'm sorry if I'm posting in the incorrect thread. I will get more conversant with the site as I navigate more. I appeared for my first GMAT yesterday and scored 720 (Q50, V37) with a 4 (40 %) in IR. I struggled in the IR section since I had to spend too much time on the 2 Multi source reasoning questions. I am worried about my low IR score (4) and am wondering if I should retake the exam. Would that be the correct thing to do? Given that it has been a few years since the IR section was introduced, has the IR score gained more importance now?

I am not sure if I'll be able to improve my Quant+Verbal score significantly. Any advice would be immensely helpful.

kkcricket wrote:I'm new to the forum hence I'm sorry if I'm posting in the incorrect thread. I will get more conversant with the site as I navigate more. I appeared for my first GMAT yesterday and scored 720 (Q50, V37) with a 4 (40 %) in IR. I struggled in the IR section since I had to spend too much time on the 2 Multi source reasoning questions. I am worried about my low IR score (4) and am wondering if I should retake the exam. Would that be the correct thing to do? Given that it has been a few years since the IR section was introduced, has the IR score gained more importance now?

I am not sure if I'll be able to improve my Quant+Verbal score significantly. Any advice would be immensely helpful.

Alas, I don't think anyone can answer this question with certainty. On the one hand, the IR score still doesn't seem to be nearly as important as your quant/verbal scores, both in terms of what we see anecdotally from applicants, and in terms of how schools are ranked. (In fact, it seems to have nothing to do with rankings.) On the other hand, when you ask admissions people if schools consider the IR score, they invariably say 'yes.' So the big question is, what does that mean?

So given that there's a certain amount of ambiguity here, if there's chance that a lower IR score could hurt you, why not retake and see if you can get the best of both worlds? If the next exam works out, great. If it doesn't, or if your IR score is up, and your composite score is down, simply cancel the exam. Seems like a low-risk proposition to me.

Thank you so much for your quick response. This gives me some clarity!