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2014 June LSAT: To Cancel Your LSAT Score or Not to Cancel

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So you took the June LSAT Monday. It wasn’t the dreamlike experience you hoped it would be. Now you’re wondering, “Should I cancel my LSAT score?”

We’re here to help.

First, let’s go over what it means to cancel your LSAT score and how to do it. LSAC has to receive your cancellation request within six days of the LSAT. You can send your request by fax or overnight mail; there’s no way to cancel your LSAT score online. LSAC tells you exactly what you need to send to cancel your LSAT score.

If you cancel your June LSAT score, law schools will see that you took the exam and canceled, but they won’t ever know what you would have scored. Nor will you know; your June LSAT score will be forever a mystery. The June LSAT will count toward your limit of three LSAT administrations within two years even if you cancel.

Now, for whether or not to cancel your LSAT score. It’s perfectly normal to walk out of the LSAT test center feeling uneasy. The LSAT is a hard test, and it generally feels especially hard when you take it in an official test center and you know it counts. That’s not a good enough reason to cancel.

Law schools mostly look at your highest LSAT score these days. After all, that’s the one that factors into a certain magazine’s law school rankings. Therefore, a disappointing LSAT score isn’t the scary prospect that it was back in the day, when we had to walk five miles to school every day, in the snow, uphill both ways. If you get a bad score on the LSAT, the solution is simple: retake it and do better.

Cancel your June LSAT score only if you have good reason to really really think that you did worse than you’d be OK with. Did you spend half the Reading Comp section showing the toilet exactly how the LSAT makes you feel? Maybe you should cancel your June LSAT score. Did you get more tears than pencil lead on the Logic Games? Maybe you should cancel your June LSAT score. Did you fantasize about your proctor instead of, uh, reasoning logically? Maybe you should cancel your June LSAT score.

It might be worth cancelling your June LSAT score, too, if your practice LSAT scores never approached a number you’d be OK with. Or if you worked way slower than usual and got to considerably fewer questions on multiple sections. You get the deal. A decision to cancel your LSAT score should be based on something concrete, not on the general feeling of unease that almost everyone has when they walk out of the LSAT test center.

Finally, a word about that Logic Game. You know the one I’m talking about. Lots of people seem to be freaking out about it. Some of you might be considering cancelling your June LSAT score because of that game. If you are, some questions for you: how many questions were on the game? Even if you couldn’t really figure out what was going on, is there a chance you got some of them right, anyway? What was your accuracy normally like on the hardest game of a section, and realistically, just how much worse do you think this one was? It’s frustrating to have a game mess with your head like that, but those few questions might not amount to a good reason to cancel.

If that Logic Game was really as hard as people say (I’m eagerly awaiting the release of the June LSAT so I can see it for myself), the LSAT score conversion table will reflect that. But it would also be fallacious to assume that the June LSAT’s score conversion table will be especially forgiving just because of that one Logic Game. It’s not the first time LSAT test-takers have freaked out about a Logic Game. In June 2009, mauve dinosaurs were the talk of the town, while in October 2012 everyone wondered just what was the deal with those zones and subzones. Neither of those LSAT administrations had a very forgiving LSAT score conversion table. Subjectively, from my perspective, it seems like the freak-out is a little bigger this time, but that doesn’t mean very much. “That game” should factor into your decision whether or not to cancel just as anything else on the test should: don’t freak out because you missed a few questions, but also don’t assume the collective freak-out means those questions will count less than usual.

And one more thing: Before you make up your mind, check out this video for a good way to do a question-by-question analysis as you make up your mind about whether to cancel your June LSAT score.