I barely missed my Quantative mark. Would my scores still be enough?

[Bglepnir]

I am feeling just a little worried by this. I plan on applying to grad school soon and I got a 162 Quant and 160 Verbal, I haven't gotten the analytical writing back yet. I would like to apply to a computer science PHD program, but the graduate program I want to apply to says that the average students accepted are 163 Quant and 158 Verbal, but that in recent years those accepted have been above average. The analytical they want is 5.0

 

There is also the issue that my GPA is missing the mark just a little. They say that their average students who are accepted have a 3.5. Mine is 3.47. I feel that this is a slight missinterpretation of my ablities. In major it was 3.56. I also was allowed to take graduate courses as an undergrad (despite not officially being in my undergrade schools grad program), and therefore had a graduate GPA which was 3.76 (only over three classes though). I tended to do much better at the end. However, when I called the graduate program I'm appling to, to ask which I should put first, they wanted me to use my undergrad GPA and use my graduate as a side note. I'm hoping that what I have will impress them enough that they will look at the rest of my information. By the time I would actually be going into their program (fall 2014) I'll also have over a year and a half of experience as a programmer. The work I'm doing isn't extremely impressive however.

 

Bascially I want to know if two extra point in verbal will make up for that one point in quant. I know for CS quant is the most important of the three scores, so it feels like I may be ahead (the difference is 6 percentile[83-77] in verbal, compared to one percentile[87-88] in quant), but I'm not ahead in where it counts. At what analytical score should I not be worried? I am not completely sure I have time to retake it. Applications to the program are due on the 15th of december.

[TakeruK]

Remember that by definition, a significant fraction of accepted students will have scores below the published "average" value. 

 

Also, admission is a non-quantitative and holistic process. That is, the committee will look at your entire package as a whole and judge it -- it's unlikely they will assign each criteria a number of points and then award admission to the highest scores! So it's not a quantitative process, especially since you can't "score" things like LORs, CVs, SOPs etc. Thus, you can't really ask questions like "does extra points in X count for a deficiency in Y". Although some programs might have to do an initial cut based on numbers in order to cut down the amount they can look at, being close to average should allow you to make this cut, in theory. After all, if a good chunk of people that actually get admitted fall below the average, there's no way they are cutting applications at the published average scores.

 

So I think you are in good shape to not have to worry about your application being thrown out at the school you're applying for. They will also look at your transcript as a whole and see the trend in your GPA and where your strong courses are. I'm not sure if it's worth spending the time to bump your GRE scores by 1 or 2 points -- instead use that time to write a really impactful SOP