710 aiming top 5 schools.. retake?

[chasingfate]

Hi all,

Looking for advice here... Would like to apply R1 to top 5 schools.
3.7 GPA at top Canadian school, 1 year work experience in China, 2 years at top CPG in marketing.
However just completed first GMAT attempt with 710, extremely weak in quant (Q47 V41)
Should I retake? Only a month away from application deadlines...
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!!!

[bpolley00]

I am not an expert but here is what I have gathered from my months of slaving away studying and looking up information: I think a 710 puts you right near the average. Anything above a 700 I think is a great performance and I can tell you right now that I have had a lot of the advanced business math and it is much more strait forward than the GMAT. Do you think admissions really cares about you getting 2-3 more quant questions wrong than another candidate over perhaps the qualities in a person they are looking for? Also, if you think about the GMAT is skewed so heavily on quant at the upper levels that I would argue the difference is serendipity and perhaps getting questions you are either good at or weak at. That doesn't even include the fact that some of the questions at the upper level are pretty dicey. I would focus on your application, telling your story, and really thinking about how you want all of that to be a reflection of what you are trying to tell the admissions committee and really focusing on WHY you even want to do this.

In the Grande scheme of things- in 60 years from now are you really going to look back and say OH GOSH THE ONE THING IN Life I failed at was not raising my quant score from a 47 to impress an admissions committee that obviously doesn't care that much about it ( I mean Stanford's range is what a 540 to a 780)? I think you know the answer to that.

Good luck.

-BP

P.S. I have my retake Thursday and I scored a 770 today on the GMATPREP test2 (obviously some repeats). I went back through and looked at some of the questions and honestly they get almost funny at the 750 level. I am not expecting to score that well on test day and I would be utterly happy with a 700+.