I think it depends. When I wrote the GMAT (albeit in 1992), a good score would get you into most Canadian business schools even if you had mediocre marks.

My recollection of the GMAT's difficulty was that any high school grad with an A average could easily score higher than the 80 percentile on the test. While I was happy my result gave me the ability to choose which business school I wanted to go to (my marks, while not bad, were also nothing to brag about), I also think the GMAT was a useless selection criterion.

I am not familiar with business school admissions, but it is very rare nowadays to get into non cash-cow grad school programs in STEM fields on the basis of the GRE score alone.

Obviously unmotivated?

Your thoughtless dismissal of those less intelligent is enraging. Do you think all the people who work harder than you to get worse results are less motivated?

There are tens of thousands of people who would love to get into top graduate programmes, who love the subject they study but who just aren’t as smart as other people and you’re shitting on them as unmotivated?

Conscientiousness and intelligence are negatively correlated.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30661143/Con...

The GRE is designed to reward hard workers as well as intelligent people, that's why it is a widely used metric. Grad schools need hard working people as much as (probably more than, to be fair) they need intelligent people.

I am joining a CS PhD program in an US university this fall. The GRE, especially the math part, is high school mathematics. If you are not good at math, you can ace it by studying hard for a month.

That is why a low GRE quant score reflects that you haven't really bothered.