excellrec

Without analyzing this too critically, I would just say submit the high verbal one. To be brutally honest, from a brief glance the first scores would suggest to me an average to slightly above average candidate, while the second scores would suggest someone reasonably bright that hasn't studied math much. Of course, you haven't mentioned the AW scores......

I'd not heard that you could contest it prior to reading this thread, so it hadn't really crossed my mind. At this point I don't really think there is time for that this season. If there were time, however, I probably still wouldn't. I have published multiple articles as first and co-author in peer-reviewed journals in my field. I honestly could not fathom a school doubting my ability to write based on a test score despite proven ability writing in my field.

I'm in a similar boat, 165 Verbal and 4.0 AW. I also have multiple publications and a fair amount of professional writing experience. For our sakes, I hope these scores are seen as proxy measures for actual ability. If this is the belief of graduate programs, they would just look at your actual writing achievements rather than the AW score. I honestly don't know who in their right mind would say, "They have plenty of proven professional writing experience but this GRE writing score is pretty poor, I wonder if they can hack it in the professional writing world?".