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Should You Cancel Your June 2010 LSAT?

BPPcolin-lsat-blog-poodleIf you took the test on Monday, I feel for you. You’re probably still suffering from some mulch-induced PTSD. The whole thing may have been a rather harrowing experience. That’s normal. That’s the LSAT. But did it really go poorly? Is it time to cancel your score?

If you’re thinking about canceling, you should be pretty certain that it’s the right thing to do. Tons of people walk out of the testing center feeling like they were just run over by a recycling truck. Really, almost everyone has a general feeling of impending doom after taking the test. But just feeling bad about the test isn’t enough reason to cancel. I’ve had so many students who thought they did terribly, but ended up not canceling and doing incredibly well. Could this be you? Well, it depends on why you think you did terribly.

More likely than not, your wanting to cancel involves the following reasoning, which I’ve been hearing on 24-hour repeat since the test ended: “there were hard questions and I think I probably missed a lot.” This isn’t reasoning; this is just pessimism. If you can’t put your finger on something specific that went disastrously wrong, then probably nothing did. The questions were probably standard, and you probably did as well as you usually did. If the questions were indeed harder, then the curve will correct that.

If you are going to cancel and retake in October, it should be the case that there was something anomalous and terrible about the test. For example, if you normally comfortably finish all four RC passages, but this time you got to two and a half, then that’s something real and significant. Or if you got diarrhea during the last LR and had to go to the bathroom for 10 minutes. Also bad. Your decision to cancel should be a measured and rational one, based on what you know for sure about your performance on Monday. Check out the video on the right for more.

If you do decide to cancel, LSAC has to receive the cancellation form within 6 days of the test, which you can find here (http://www.lsac.org/pdfs/ScoreCancellationForm.pdf). You should make your decision and send it in by Friday, just to be safe. I wouldn’t trust the postal service to get it to LSAC in any sort of timely manner, so you should fax it. Keep proof that you sent it, and be absolutely certain that you get a confirmation that they received it. If you don’t get this within four days, start calling.

But again, think long and hard before you take this step, because it’s entirely possibly you’re canceling a good score. You’ll never know if it really did go well or not, and you’ll have to live with that uncertainty for the rest of your life.