So it’s been a few days since you took the February LSAT, and you’re feeling not-so-good. Now you must decide: do you keep your February LSAT score and hope for the best, or do you assume the worst and cancel? The deadline is tomorrow, so it’s time to make up your mind.
First, the nuts and bolts: if you cancel, neither you nor law schools will ever know what you would have scored on the February LSAT. Law schools will see that you took the test and canceled your LSAT score, but one cancellation is no big deal at all. A cancelled LSAT score counts toward your limit of three LSAT administrations in two years.
In this day and age, it’s easy to buy anything from books to cars to sex to drugs online (or so I hear). But cancelling your LSAT score must still be done by old-fashioned means: by fax or overnight mail. You can, however, download the form and get more information from LSAC.
Now, for the decision whether to cancel your February LSAT score. Since law schools these days tend to pay much more attention to your best LSAT score, there’s much less downside to a disappointing LSAT score on your record than there used to be, back in the dark ages when law schools generally took the average of any LSAT scores on your record. So it’s not worth cancelling based on a general uneasy feeling. Everyone has that after the LSAT. Only cancel your LSAT score if you have concrete reasons to believe you didn’t do nearly as well as you hoped. Let’s run through some examples.
Bad reason to cancel your February LSAT score: “OMG, that last Logic Game was so hard.”
So it was a hard Logic Game. Think back to the practice LSATs you took: how many of them didn’t have a hard Logic Game? I’m guessing not very many of them, if any. The difference is that you got to review and figure out the LSAT Logic Games on your practice tests right away, whereas you’ll never see this one again (got to love the February LSAT). There’s always hard stuff on the LSAT. You’re naturally going to remember the hard stuff more, but that doesn’t mean you did worse than normal.
OK reason to cancel you February LSAT score: “So with a couple questions left on the third game, I realized I had diagrammed a rule backwards. I went back and fixed it, but then I only had time to get back to half of the questions on that game and I didn’t even get to the fourth game at all.”
If you normally got through all the games on your practice LSATs, and then this happened to you, then, yes, you can probably do much better if you retake. Cancelling your LSAT score might be for you.
Bad reason to cancel your February LSAT score: “A couple of logical reasoning questions were really weird, and I wasn’t even sure what they were asking.”
You’re going to remember those. You spent months studying, and learning about all the questions they can ask on the LSAT. Then you got a couple that, at least in the heat of the moment, didn’t seem like anything you knew. That’s frustrating. But we’re talking about two questions. Two questions aren’t going to make or break your LSAT score. And who knows, maybe you even got them right.
OK reason to cancel your February LSAT score: “I got hung up on some early questions in one of the LR sections, and before I knew it I had 10 minutes left for the last 13 questions. I made it to the end but it was a blur and there was a lot of educated guessing involved.”
The end of the LR section tends to have the hardest questions. If you normally made it through an entire LR section with good accuracy, odds are good that a section like that hurt your LSAT score. Especially if you don’t feel great about the rest of the test, you might want to cancel.
Of course, there’s some gray area. Check out this video for a systematic way to go through your recollection of the LSAT and make your decision. If you’re on the fence, keep the LSAT score. Good luck with the decision, but decide now! Don’t delay!