Should I Cancel My LSAT Score? | How To Cancel LSAT Score | Will Law Schools See Canceled LSAT?

Should you cancel your LSAT score? So you just took the LSAT. Congratulations! But what if you're not feeling as great about it as you were hoping to? The thought that's probably taking up a good amount of your conscious brain is to cancel or not to cancel. And of course, that's something we have to decide pretty quickly. If you're like 99.999% of all LSAT test takers, you're throwing around a lot of options in your mind right now. So we decided to make a short video to hopefully help you with that decision. Here's what we know about canceling your LSAT score. From the time you complete your official LSAT test, whether it's in person or remotely, you have six, count them, six days to make that fateful decision. You can cancel your score through the LSAT status page inside your LSAC account or by contacting LSAC directly via phone or email. Now here's the exception. If you purchase the score preview option, you have a bit more time. Score preview allows test takers to see their LSAT score before deciding whether to keep it and report it to law schools. You'll still receive your score on the same score release date as everyone else. Once you see your score, you have six days to decide if you want to cancel or keep the score. If no action is taken after the six days, it'll automatically go on your score report. The other thing that's important to know is there are no takebacks here. Once you cancel your score, whether or not you've previewed it, it's canceled for good. Law schools will know that you took the LSAT and canceled, but they won't see what your canceled score was. The fact that law schools will actually see that you canceled your score can be frightening. But nearly all the admissions people we've talked to have told us that one cancellation on an LSAT report isn't a big deal. We all have a bad day. But if you're thinking about canceling for the second or third time, that starts to look a bit fishy. And don't forget that canceled LSAT attempts count towards the limited number of times you can take the LSAT, which is five times within the current reportable score period and seven times total in a lifetime. So, okay, we know you're a little anxious about whether to cancel your score. First, a bit of general advice, and please, please take this to heart. Sleep on it. You might be feeling a little rough after your LSAT. Self-doubt might start creeping in. It's totally normal. We have taught thousands of LSAT students, and we haven't known a single person who has walked out saying, psh, that was nothing. Easy test. There's so much pressure riding on it. So it's very natural to think that you did poorly afterward and immediately want to log on and start canceling your score. But of course, you don't really want to do that. So give yourself a little bit of time. Let's talk about how you can figure out whether you did poorly or aced this thing. The first thing that you need to do is knock the experimental section out. The caveat here is you won't exactly know which section was experimental. Now you have three sections left, and your job, along with our help, is to figure out, am I going to be happy with the LSAT score that comes in roughly three weeks? Over the years, we've developed an exercise that you can go through. Nothing too complicated, but it will at least force you to think about how you performed on the test and hopefully figure out whether you're going to be happy with your hypothetical score. Let's talk numbers. Make a little table. Nothing fancy. See this happy face? Good day. Sad face. That's a bad day. So what we're going to do is take the three scored sections of the LSAT, two logical reasoning sections, and one reading comprehension section. And we're now going to estimate how many questions I got wrong on the recent LSAT if it was a good day versus a bad day. Let's say in each logical reasoning section, I think that on a good day, I got five wrong or left blank, and that on a bad day, I got eight wrong or left blank. Let's say in reading comp, I felt reasonably strong, but one passage was a little bit tricky. So I can narrow this down to somewhere between minus four on a good day and minus seven on a bad day. And now you have some sort of idea of where you might end up. Now you just have to total these up and give yourself a raw score for the test. I'll do the math quickly here. So this would be minus 14 on a good day, and over here, I got minus 23 on a bad day. Here's what I want to do next. Take these raw scores and find a recent score conversion chart. Check the description below for a link to one, and then we want to see what LSAT scores these would have converted to on a recent LSAT. Let's take a look at these numbers against the May 2020 exam. Minus 14 on that exam would have given me around a 165. Minus 23 would have landed me at around a 159. So on a good day, I'd likely score a 165, and on a bad day, I would have scored a 159. Remember, these are all hypotheticals. Now that might seem like a pretty wide range between 159 and 165. We want to narrow it down a bit. Chances are you didn't do as well as you think you might have on all the sections, or to be fair, as poorly as you thought you might have. It's probably some mix of the two. So normally, we say you might want to take that and knock off two points on each side. So now we're talking more in the 161 and 163 range, and now we're getting a lot closer to where your actual LSAT score might have landed. So let's start with the highest possible score, 163. Let's say you were taking practice tests and scoring higher than a 163, and even if you scored at the top of this range, you still wouldn't be happy. Now what? Now we look at the schools you're targeting. If your score is five or more points below the 25th percentile LSAT score at the schools you're applying to, it's probably wise to cancel. If not, you probably shouldn't cancel. On the flip side, if in the worst case scenario you're thinking, that sounds great to me, 161, that's a good LSAT score. If you'd still be happy going into your law school applications with a 161, then you probably don't need to cancel. Now if you're somewhere in the middle and you'd be happy with the high score possibility, but not happy with the low score, that's when it starts to get a little bit tricky. Before I let you go, let's recap real quickly. Number one, sleep on it. Please, please, please, please, please, please don't do anything drastic. You will of course always think you did horribly on the day of, or even sometimes two days after you took the test. Don't let that freak you out. Number two, go through some process like we just did together, so you can force yourself to realistically evaluate how you did on the test. And with all that in mind, relax, think it through, and make an informed decision. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel to get notified about our next video. No matter what you choose, everyone here at Blueprint LSAT will be here to help you, whether you want to shoot for a retake or you're ready to get into your law school applications.