BAD BAD GMAT Score

[eunjung0620]

Hello..
I just took my GMAT exam yesterday and it was my second attempt.
I got 590 for my first attempt, which is very low.. And I was expecting to get around 610-630 for the second attempt since my practice CATs were about in that range. However, disastrously... I got 480 which I never expected to get that low.. I guess I had some concentrating issues during the exam..
And the biggest problem is that I was overly shocked looking at the score and pressed the report option by mistake instead of cancelling the score immediately after the full exam.
So my question is... although I retake the exam and get mid-600 score, would school admissions highly consider about my 480 score and would I be disadvantaged in getting accepted to schools?
I'm really in a shock right now and I don't know what to do... I've been preparing this for about 10 months now(took a while because of my deficiency in English) and I'm really about to give up on this...
Help me!

[mbamissionjenK]

Hi there,

So sorry you had the frustrating experience of scoring a lot lower than you expected, and then choosing to report rather than cancel. :(

The good news is, the schools take the highest score into consideration... because the test is adaptive, it's not theoretically possible to 'out-perform' your actual ability... but anyone can have a 'bad' day or have something go wrong, so they will consider that. In fact on many applications you self-report your chosen/highest score and while it would be verified at some point along the lines with the official report, it's not always even a big focus to assess the detailed report as a deciding factor.

All that said, I would recommend taking it again! And investing in some preparation and/or a tutor/course to really identify what areas you can best strengthen and really bump up that score. Good luck to you!