Should You Retake Your GMAT If You Scored 690? Would It Make a Difference?

Update: This student was awarded a $50,000 MBA scholarship as a result of retaking his GMAT with GMATPill!

Retaking the GMAT really depends on your application profile–in most cases I would say probably not. 690 is a solid score but everything needs to be taken in context.

This student, who just reported his 760 GMAT Score, originally scored 690.

690. Decent score. The problem? He was waitlisted.

Now of course, your entire application profile is evaluated–not just your score. But upon further inspection of the 690 score, you’ll notice this student did extremely well on Quant but not so hot no Verbal.

Here was the break down: Q50, V32

Admissions committees don’t just look at your overall score! They look at the breakdown between quant and verbal to make sure there is not too much of a discrepancy between your two scores. In this case, the discrepancy was wide enough that one could speculate that perhaps the admissions committee members did not like this score imbalance between the two sections.

Adcom wants their business school students to be well-rounded—not particularly strong or weak in an area. Having a good score that is also balanced is important. In fact, a slightly lower quant score and slightly higher verbal score that would also result in a score of 690 would have been preferred over the extremely high quant score and lower verbal score.

This MBA applicant recognized this issue and decided to retake the GMAT. In fact, he enrolled with GMAT Pill for the purpose of closing this gap.

Not only did he score in the 99th percentile this time with a score improvement of 70 points from what was already a pretty decent score, he also got a call from the admissions committee literally the next day telling him he was off the waitlist and now accepted into the business school!

Such an inspirational story that I hope motivates those of you preparing for the GMAT as a part of your career development.

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