I am embarrassed that it has come to this, but I really need some anonymous advice. I took the GRE recently (still waiting for the official scores), and received a 169 in the Verbal and a 154 in the Quantitative component. As a Humanities guy who only spent 3-4 days preparing for the exam, I'm reasonably content with my performance in those two areas. Both are significantly (7 to 8 percentile points) above the reported averages for my top choice PhD program.
This is where my story takes a turn towards the tragic... Resulting from a certain digestive situation, I had to leave the exam room for 10-15 minutes during the Issue task for the Writing section. By the time I returned, I was unable to finish my response. The exam question explicitly asked to, at some point in my formulation, address potential criticisms of the argument.. Effectively, I was unable to follow instructions fully. That probably drops me to a 1, right? Is my situation completely hopeless? My other essay was decent, but judging from other posters, probably didn't reach a 6 level on the grading scale.
I have always prided myself on my analytical writing abilities, and as a result, did minimal prep work for the AW. Otherwise, I have a 4.0 from a very prestigious Ivy, 3 recommendations that attest to my writing ability, excellent sample/SOP... I mean will this atrocious performance on the writing invariably knock me out of contention for a PhD spot? It just seems insane that this will have such an impact on my future, but again such is life.
One of my recommenders (who has been a mentor to me) has very close connections to the faculty at my top choice program, and has even facillitated a meeting with prominent faculty members to help me chart out a plan of procuring funding from the school, etc. I told her about my screw up and she said we'd communicate with the schools if that became an issue. Is there any chance for me?