“Should I cancel my December LSAT?”

“Should I cancel my December LSAT?” That’s not a question anyone wants to consider, especially after going through the agony of prepping for the LSAT and sitting the test for most of a day.

You are totally stressed, so the first thing to do is sit back in your chair, take your hand off the mouse, and take a deep breath. And reach for the asprin. This is an important decision, it requires weighing some important considerations.

The “good news, bad news” discussion is a good place to start.
Since you took the December LSAT you back is really up against the wall. You have virtually no wiggle room to retake the exam in February and get your scores back in time to apply for most of the competitive law schools. (That was the bad news in case you hadn’t figured that out). In general terms there really isn’t any good news in this scenario. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t cancel and retake, but you have a lot fewer options than if you had to cancel a test taken earlier in the year.

Before we go any further, remember that you only have 6 days to cancel your score (Instructions for how to cancel an LSAT score). If you haven’t already let the 6 day deadline slip, you can read this post, reflect, and decide. Also note that LSAC regularly changes deadlines and rules. Depending on how old this post is when you read it, the magic number may no longer be 6 days. Always confirm all information on the LSAC site.

Many people overlook this next item- Do the law schools you will apply to average multiple scores, or do they just use your highest score? The only way to know for sure is to contact your target schools. But, if it is a ‘highest score’ school, your conclusion will much different than it would be for an ‘average score’ school. For example, if you think your score will be just a little lower than your target score, and you are applying to a ‘highest score’ law school, then you obviously want to keep that score, and maybe try for a higher score in February. Contrast this with the situation where you think you may have gotten a much lower score than your target, and you are applying to an ‘average score’ school. In this case, you’d definitely want to cancel you December score, take the February LSAT, and hope that your score is high enough to get you one of the few remaining slots in late February.

Deciding where you fit between these two extremes is a two-step process. First, was there any absolutely obvious reason you must cancel? If not, go to the second level of the analysis; is there a good possibility that you will score higher the next time you take it?

When should you definitely cancel your December LSAT score?

First things first: Strongly consider canceling an LSAT score if one or more of the following are true:

The list of things that can go wrong, and has gone wrong, is pretty much limitless (and would be funny, except that it happened to someone) but these are some of the most common horror stories.

You had a getting-to the test center disaster: We often hear about a student not being woken up by their alarms, not going to the correct test center, not being able to find the test center, getting stuck in a blizzard, etc. (In fact, we heard it so often that we made it part of our pre-test curriculum to make sure our students didn’t make these mistakes.) The end result is that if you arrived at the center so late and flustered that you totally underperformed, then cancellation may be a smart choice. (Obviously, if you got there so late that you couldn’t even get admitted to take the test, then a totally different set of facts apply; you need to check out the post how to reschedule your LSAT date.)

You had a during-the-test disaster: Man, have we heard some stories here as well. There was the one about the fire alarm that kept going off and the proctors herded the students out of the building multiple times. Imagine what that does for one’s concentration. Or, there was the one about the crazy fellow-test taker/proctor/random nutcase outside the testing room; you get the idea. But it doesn’t have to be so dramatic. When you sit in a classroom for hours on end, even a noisy air unit/desk/neighbor can cause some of us to perform sub-optimally. Not everyone has super-human focusing skills such that they can tune out distractions on top of all their other stress.

You had a test-taking disaster: These are usually either errors or illness. You know for a fact that you mis-entered your answer sheet (and couldn’t correct it in time.). You were really, really sick (like, you shouldn’t have even gone.) Errors, illness, or something else; if something went so wrong for you that you know it walking out the door, then you know what you have to do.

You made a really dumb choice and didn’t prepare at all: If you thought you could just take the LSAT cold, well, that was just dumb. Cancel your LSAT score now, if you want to realize your full potential for law school applications.

You may want to cancel your December LSAT score if:

This analysis is a lot more nuanced. I assume that you did a reasonable amount of prep, that during that prep you reached a scoring plateau (plus or minus a few points) on your practice tests, and that you know how well you normally feel after taking practice tests.

Now consider the following items:

Analyze your test. Did you feel about the same as you did after taking practice tests? Probably not, or you wouldn’t be reading this post. If you feel worse, is there a specific issue, or just a general sense of unease? Did you guess far more often than normal? Did you struggle with one or more games far more than normal? The point is, was there something obviously out of the ordinary, and could that impact your score? If you can’t put your finger on a specific problem, cancellation is probably a bad idea.

Finally, will you have the time and resources to put in the effort to do better next time? After all, if you don’t get any score score for the December LSAT, you will have to wait until the February LSAT, by which point many law school slots will already be filled.

Tags: cancel lsat, december lsat, lsat score, test advice