EssaySnark

($) “Should I give a reason for a lower GMAT score in an essay?”

by EssaySnark

Some Brave Supplicant found our erstwhile blahg with that question, plugged into the trust ol’ Google machine. The short answer to this is: No. Or, maybe we’ll qualify it with the ever-unhelpful It depends.  The thing is, there really isn’t much of a “reason” you can offer for why you didn’t do well on the…

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Here's what others have said about this:

  1. I actually AM dyslexic. Horribly dyslexic. Like I could not read a simple primer until I was nine. But I beat dyslexia out of me when it comes to reading. Comprehension makes up for the fact that I don’t really know or care what order the letters are in, but sadly, it cannot do the same thing with numbers. I try to keep things in terms of X or Y as long as I can in quantitative, but no matter how long I wait to multiply things out, I eventually hit the point where I can misread a number and create a giant mess. At least the GMAT is a multiple choice test so I could usually see when that happened… just a major time drain.

    I don’t think that the adcoms would really believe me; I scored 98%ile on verbal and got a 5.5 AWA and I am claiming that dyslexia is the reason I got a 77%ile on Quant! As if!

    I am not even going to bother explaining it and just hope that they will consider me a Poet with a strange work history (data analytics and information systems) and love me anyway.

    • @TY, a 77% on quant ain’t so bad! But depending on how nervous you are about the score, you *might* consider telling the adcom pretty much what you just laid out here – sometimes that type of story works really well in a “life experience” essay (e.g., for Columbia) or you could potentially use the optional essay for it. At the same time, you don’t really need to make excuses for a GMAT score in that range, and if you only tested once, then we wouldn’t bother offering any explanation at all – you should re-test if you’re not satisfied with the score. But, what you said here seems legit to us!

  2. Hi ES!

    Will a score of 710(92%) with q51(97%) and v35(76%) be seen as “unbalanced score” by adcoms ? I’ve scored a 5.0 in AWA. Do I need to strengthen it with TOEFL?

    Thanks!

    • @arvind15, that score is unbalanced but it’s unbalanced in a positive way! Meaning, you’ve got significant strength on the quant side, which is pretty unusual. Your verbal is not in trouble territory so we’re not concerned with this. The schools will look to your essays (and, hopefully, the interview) to evaluate your communication abilities. The TOEFL seems unnecessary, unless you’re hitting a school like Haas which requires it from all international applicants. The only comment is that if you were to retake the GMAT and boost the verbal, you’d likely see a very impressive boost in the total (assuming your quant holds steady). This alone is not a reason to retake it especially not with Rd 2 staring us in the face, but for anyone else who may wander across this at another point in the admissions season then that’s something to consider.

      Hope that helps!
      EssaySnark