Retake the GRE?

<p>A little background first: I'll be graduating a year early this spring with a B.S. in Communication, Marketing minor and Agriculture emphasis. I was originally an Animal Science major and enjoy dairy cattle genetics. I am strongly considering attending graduate school for Animal Science with an emphasis in genetics, partially because I'm not sure I'm challenged enough by communication. It seems a little backwords I suppose, but I enjoy both fields. I don't intend to change my major at this point since I'm so close to graduating but I am taking Calculus and Stats, which aren't required of my major, so I can get into graduate school. </p>

<p>I unfortunately only studied for the GRE for a month and only focused on it for about 2 weeks. I got a 550 on my verbal and 500 on the quantitative. Personally I'm disappointed in it, especially since I usually do a lot better on these things. My verbal is fine but I know quantitative is more important for the field I want to go into. I've researched the averages of the grad school admits for the U of M Twin Cities, which is one school I'll apply to, and last year it was 430 for the verbal and almost 700 for the quantitative. Naturally, about 40% of their admits got quantitative scores lower than mine, but still. I feel that I may already be at a slight disadvantage with my major and I want to be able to get in but don't want to invent in retaking the GRE again unless it's worth it. </p>

<p>Any advice would be helpful!</p>

<p>I think you should retake. A 500 is only 28th percentile for quant. if you are already trying to get the program to accept you with an atypical background, you don’t want to give them any easy reasons not to seriously consider your application. Good luck!</p>