How important is the breakdown of your Quant & Verbal?

[brian]

I just took the GMAT yesterday. I'm pleased with my score, but I was surprised by the breakdown of my scores. My Quant was much lower than I would have expected based on my practice tests and also much lower than I would have thought possible given my overall score.

What do the scores (the double digit numbers) even mean?

I want to be happy, but I'm worried that my quant score will hurt my application since I'm coming from a non-profit background. I'm a high school English teacher, and basically I wonder if schools will discount my score because of the verbal emphasis of the test. In practice tests my math ranged from 45 to 55, with an average of about 50. I imagine I would be silly to retake the test (and certainly I don't want to pay to retake it), but the quant score worries me. I am being completely ridiculous?

Math: 49, 88 percentile
Verbal: 48, 99 percentile

Overall: 770

[Shane]

Hi Brian,

Congrats! Thats a stellar score. Honestly, no B-school will reject you on the basis of breakdown. You still scored very close to 90th percentile on Math. You have a unique background so If I were you I'll just work on the Apps and focus on how you will add to the diversity and mix of a school.

I guess you are confused about your overall score being 770 while your Math Section was close to 88th Percentile. From what I've heard and read about the GMAT way of scoring, their algorithm awards test takers with superior Verbal skills so its slightly skewed towards ones Verbal performance on the test. So what that means is that someone who scores a 90th percentile in Verbal and 84th in Math usually ends up with a much higher cummulative score than the one who scores a 90th in Math and 84th in Verbal. The reason being that the latter combination is much more common amongst test takers specially the International ones and to an extent its true for native speakers too who have a heavy Quant/Engg sort of a background.

Read the following article if you get chance; it does a great job of breaking down the overall scores of 760+:

http://www.manhattangmat.com/strategy-s ... ng-700.cfm

By the way we can all benefit if you have any tips to share on your test taking experience since you recently took the test and did so well :)

Good luck with the apps!

[mdinerstein]

Hi Brian,

Wow! Congratulations on the 770! That's a tremendous score and you should definitely be proud of it.

As for your quant breakdown, what I've heard from Admissions Consultants is that as long as both sections are over 80th percentile, you'll be just fine. At this point, it's important to start work on your applications.

Congrats once again for being done with the GMAT!

Best,

Michael Dinerstein
Marketing & Student Services
michael@manhattangmat.com
800-576-4628
212-721-7400

[StaceyKoprince]

Excellent job! Just wanted to add my congratulations. Also, if you want to keep your toe in the teaching waters while you're in b-school, you might consider teaching for us! You've got the score and you've also got the teaching experience, which are the two primary requirements.

(I should warn you that we hire less than 20% of the people who DO have both the score and the teaching experience - so it's not a shoo-in - but if you're interested, you should definitely apply!)

[amurrow]

Hi,

Below you remarked that "what I've heard from Admissions Consultants is that as long as both sections are over 80th percentile, you'll be just fine."

I just took the test and received the following breakdown:

Math: 47, 79th percentile
Verbal: 45, 98th percentile
Overall: 740, 97th percentile

Is this going to be a problem for me? I am currently an analyst at a major investment bank and will be starting a job at a large private equity fund in August. Will my financial background outweigh my poor performance on the math section?

I'm worried that I may need to take the test again.

Thanks!

[RonPurewal]

Will my financial background outweigh my poor performance on the math section?

well, no.
if there is any effect, it's likely to go the other way: i.e., the fact that you scored at this level in quant, DESPITE holding a quant-intensive job, may be taken as a negative.

here's an analogy, which is certainly not perfect, but is adequate enough:
if someone has done business in japan regularly for several years and still consistently commits social faux-pas that offend japanese sensibilities, then this is more worrisome than would be the case if an occasional tourist committed the same faux-pas.

--

a couple of further thoughts on this, though.

1, your quant score is not "poor"; it's still a good score, and your score of 740 is substantially higher than the median for admitted students at EVERY business school.

2, you should only re-take the gmat if you think that you will be able to duplicate your current verbal score. if that verbal score is AT ALL significantly higher than you've been averaging on practice tests (esp. on the official gmatprep practice tests), then you probably should not re-take, lest you tarnish that particular piece of shining verbal near-perfection.

3, you should talk to the business school(s) in which you are interested. there is a non-negligible chance that some of them will actually tell you if you should do anything about your quant, and, if so, what you should do.

[RonPurewal]

Will my financial background outweigh my poor performance on the math section?

well, no.
if there is any effect, it's likely to go the other way: i.e., the fact that you scored at this level in quant, DESPITE holding a quant-intensive job, may be taken as a negative.
this will be exacerbated if the overall population of finance people performs better than you on the quant. (i have no idea whether this is the case.)

here's an analogy, which is certainly not perfect, but is adequate enough:
if someone has done business in japan regularly for several years and still consistently commits social faux-pas that offend japanese sensibilities, then this is more worrisome than would be the case if an occasional tourist committed the same faux-pas.
the difference will be exacerbated if most western businesspeople learn japanese customs quickly and easily.

--

a couple of further thoughts on this, though.

1, your quant score is not "poor"; it's still a good score, and your score of 740 is substantially higher than the median for admitted students at EVERY business school.

2, you should only re-take the gmat if you think that you will be able to duplicate your current verbal score. if that verbal score is AT ALL significantly higher than you've been averaging on practice tests (esp. on the official gmatprep practice tests), then you probably should not re-take, lest you tarnish that particular piece of shining verbal near-perfection.

3, you should talk to the business school(s) in which you are interested. there is a non-negligible chance that some of them will actually tell you if you should do anything about your quant, and, if so, what you should do.

[amurrow]

I guess my question at the end of the day is will this really affect my admission at a top school?

I understand your analogy, but finance really only involves basic math. We don't do anything harder than addition/subtraction/multiplication/division and doing calculations is only one portion of my job. So to make the assumption that I should have better math skills because I'm in finance is not completely founded. Addtionally, I've performed at the top of my analyst class consistently.

The bottom line is that the math section is tough for me. The first time I took the test I got a 540 and scored in the 30th percentile for math. Improving 50 percentage points took a lot of work. Could I have done better? Yes, I absolutely believe so, but it doesn't come easily to me.

What I really need to know is whether this could hurt me during the admissions process. I'm absolutely willing to take the time to improve my math score, but what's the threshold I would have to pass for it to make a meaningful difference? Can I just take the time to explain the difference in one of my admissions essays?

Sorry for all the questions, but I have always been a stronger humanities student and I think that I've "defied odds" by entering into a finance field and performing well. You painted it as a detriment to my file which is what worries me.

Thanks for all your help,
Allyson

[StaceyKoprince]

From what I've heard, 79th is close enough to 80th that the schools will think it's fine. But you should ask this question in the admissions consulting folder - list the specific schools to which you plan to apply and ask the admissions folks whether they know / can guess how those specific schools would feel about your performance.

Also, I second Ron's suggestion to ask the school. It's surprising to a lot of people how forthcoming the schools are - they will often just flat out tell you whether they think you should take it again!

(But, really, 79th is basically the same as 80th. If they want 80th, 79th is not going to keep you out. It won't get you in, either - but no GMAT score will get you accepted. They just use the GMAT as a "threshold" indicator - is it high enough that we don't need to worry about this person? But the other stuff - work experience, etc - is more important in terms of actually getting you admitted.)