jmh530

Yeah I took it about 4 or 5 years ago and just graduated from bschool last summer. I only took it once and my score was about 100 points shy of 700+ but I was only applying to the evening program of a border line tierI school so I knew my score wasn’t a big enough deal to sink a lot of time, money, and effort in it. I bought a Kaplan book, read it, and did some of the practice problems but there’s classes and the whole nine yards of course. The evening program stats don’t count in the rankings so the GMAT’s pretty much a technicality. To get into to a top 10 or 20 school’s full time program you probably need around a 700, all else equal, which is entirely doable.
What really sucks about the GMAT is that after you finish, you get to decide on the spot whether or not you want it graded. If you say no it doesn’t get scored and you just took it for fun and paid $300$400 for the morning of joy. If you say yes it gets graded, immediately forwarded to the school(s) you tell them you’re applying to, and posted to your record with the GMAT corp. Schools obviously like to see high scores but they frown on more than 2 or 3 attempts because they know the exam’s gameable.