Why you almost definitely shouldn’t cancel your LSAT score
Posted by John in Application Process, LSAT, Test taking, tags: cancel, cancelation, test day
You're done! Don't panic.
For most LSAT takers, today should be a day to celebrate — the test is finally over! While we won’t know how everyone did until scores come back in a few weeks, at least we’ll get a score in the books.
However, there’s definitely a subset of students who consider cancelling their scores. This can be an agonizing decision, so I want to make it a bit easier: you almost certainly shouldn’t cancel your score.
First, score cancellation means that your test is not scored, so you never see the score, and admissions committees cannot see it either. They can, however, see that you cancelled a score. A single cancelled test will almost certainly not negatively impact your chances for admissions (though several cancellations would raise red flags). That said, it would be better to have a cancellation on your record than a very low score.
You should consider cancelling your score if:
- You were quite ill during the test, and you felt you were not doing close to your best
- You know for sure that you misbubbled a section or large portion of a section
- You were nervous to the extent that you didn’t get to large swaths of questions you normally would have.
That last one comes with important caveats. Many students do slightly worse on test day than they did on their best practice tests. If you reached 2 fewer questions than usual, you should not cancel. If you have a general feeling that you didn’t do as well as you wanted, you should not cancel.
Bottom line: unless you have a very specific reason to cancel your score, you should not do so.
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