should i retake? pls help

[ananth]

hi all,

i just had my first go at the gmat and got a 700 (Q45 77%, V40 89%, Overall 700 92%) and pretty convinced I should do it again in a couple of months. I know I am capable of a higher verbal score, as I consistently scored 45 during practice. Here are my worries:

- If I retake and get a lower score will the schools look at the more recent (and hence lower) one?
- Is a raw score of 45 in quant (77th percentile) extremely low? I have a feeling I cant improve this too much.

I am aiming for top schools (wharton, insead, columbia, harvard and LBS). By the time I hope to start the MBA I should have 3.5-4 years of experience in my specialised field (hotel consulting). My recommendations will be pretty good.

With a score of 700 will this make a strong case? Or should I retake with the aim to score another 20-30 points?

Thanks.

[mjoeb]

You can retake if you want, however, your time can be put to best use if you focuse on your admissions essays.

You should also note that I actually read a story on another forum about a person who wrote the GMAT 5 or 6 times and he scored 700 just like you did. He is now at Wharton.

So if you think it's worth the energy, money, time to go from 700-750 then sure, do what you wish.

But I'd recommend talking to the people from these schools first and ask for first hand advice.

[AGJAMESNEWYORK]

700 is a very competitive score for any school that you apply to. There is no need to think that your GMAT score will keep you out of any school that you apply to because it certainly doesn't. At this point you should be more focused on building your resume...believe me when I tell you that you have an awesome score and it will not prevent you from getting into schools such as Harvard. I know people who got into Harvard with 670 and 3 years of work experience, however, he did wrote an awesome essay.

On a different note, I will be taking the exam this Friday and I am wondering how did you prepare in your final days leading up to the exam. Could you let me know how you prepared for the quant section in particular and the type of questions that you saw on the exam.

Good luck with your apps and I appreciate you help in advance!

[ananth]

thanks for your input guys, much appreciated. i am now inclined to focus on the essays and put the gmat chapter to rest.

as for my prep, i actually gradually slowed down the closer i got to test day. my weakest areas have been sentence correction and data sufficiency, so during the week leading upto the test, i only practiced such questions. i only used the OG for prep.

Interestingly most of the PS and DS questions came bunched up. I would get 6-7 PS followed by 6-7 DS and so on. Lots of Yes and No type DS questions.

Verbal just felt a bit hard and I think I went wrong with questions where I guessed. There were quite a few questions in the second half where more than one answer appealed to me, especially in sentence correction. Even got one of those CR questions with a phrase and clause highlighted asking what each of them did to the argument.

[Leonard C]

I am really starting to think that any benefit over 700 or even 680 is marginal. This is from seeing the results of my mates who have submitted their apps and have either been accepted or rejected.

This forum is great in some ways, but if this is all you read, I think you start to put too much emphasis on the GMAT, when you could benefit more by starting to think about other parts of your apps.

For instance, a poster at another board (on Ask Admissions on something like that) wrote that he spent four months of extra study raising his score from 680 to 720. The feedback he got from the consultant was that he should have instead spent the four months getting a volunteer job to round out his EC activities and have something to write about in the essays.

[ananth]

Thanks Leonard for your input too. In fact I have only been reading posts on this forum since yesterday after I finished my GMAT and what it has actually done is convince me that a score difference of 700 vs. 720 is of no material significance. So instead of making me believe that its all about the GMAT, it has made me think harder about other components of the applciation package.

There seems to be a ton of emphasis on volunteer work experience, which I have almost none of. Between work and persuing personal interests I really have no time. Now I need to figure out how I can acquire such experience without making it look like a desperate and forced effort.

Thanks again.