When using a higher-order modulation scheme, there are variations in bit-reliability depending on the bit position in a modulation symbol. Variations of bit-reliability in the codeword block lower the decoding performance. Also, the decoding performance increases as the sum of the bit-reliabilities in the codeword block increases. This paper presents a novel hybrid automatic repeat request scheme that increases the sum of the reliabilities of the transmitted bits by lowering the modulation order, and decreases the variations of bit-reliability in the codeword block by preferentially retransmitting bits with low reliability. The proposed scheme outperforms the constellation rearrangement scheme. Furthermore, the proposed scheme also provides a good solution in cases where the size of the retransmission block is smaller than the size of the initial transmission block.