GRE: Retake or no?

[October229]

I'm partway through my master's and trying to decide whether or not it would be worth my time to retake the GRE as I will be applying for Clinical Psychology PhD Programs in December 2015.

First time around, I got a 153 on Verbal, 163 on Quantitative, and a 5.0 on AW. I'm completely satisfied with the quantitative and the AW, but I feel like my Verbal was a little low (59%). My undergrad GPA was 3.91 and I anticipate my master's gpa to be around the same. I have a couple years experience working in the mental health field and I'll also have research experience and will have published work, so I have both practical and research experience. I'm not concerned about letters of recommendation. So given this information, I'm not sure whether or not I should take the GRE again. I'm not looking into top 10 schools and I know that my score is dependent upon the schools I'll be applying to, I'm just looking for some general advice. I studied diligently for the GRE for a year with the help of Kaplan, and I also took several practice tests. My biggest downfall is in reading comprehension. While I'm an efficient reader, I'm a pretty slow reader. I've tried those programs and guides that help you read "smarter" in a shorter amount of time, but they didn't seem to help much.

Thoughts?

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[PsychBiker]

Of course you can retake it, but considering your other stats I am not sure its worth your time. You seem like you'll be a great PhD candidate regardless.

 

[October229]

So you don't think it's worth the time? Of course I wouldn't necessarily mind retaking it, but if I can avoid it and still have good chances of getting into a PhD program I'd certainly prefer that

 

[PsychPhDone]

I'd look at the stats for the schools you're most interested in at this point and see where your score falls in comparison with their typical admits. I know my program, for example, won't take anyone under a certain percentile because then they're not eligible for extra funding from the graduate school. While it's not blatantly written on the website, it's pretty obvious when you see our APA stats.

With that said, best of luck, and nice job getting all the pieces put into place!