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Should I Cancel My GRE Score?

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cancel your GRE score

When you finish taking the GRE, you’ll be given an option to cancel your score. This may sound like a nice option—if you really think you did terribly, it’s not too late to pretend the whole thing never happened, right? Yes, you can cancel your GRE score. But cancelling your score is not always the best course of action.

Good news about canceling your GRE score

Here are the upsides: 

  1. If you cancel your score, it’s not added to your reportable history. In other words, no school will see it. It’s like it never happened. 
  2. This decision is not irreversible. As of this writing, you can reinstate a canceled score within 60 days of canceling it.

Bad news about canceling your GRE score

But there are downsides:

  1. You must decide to cancel prior to seeing the score. So you will be canceling based solely on gut feeling of your performance. 
  2. A score can only be canceled in the moment prior to learning of your scores at the test center immediately after taking the test. 
  3. Once the reinstatement period of 60 days passes, you cannot retrieve your score or ever learn what it was. 
  4. The reinstatement fee (as of this writing) is $50.

So should you cancel your GRE score or not?

Now let’s talk about reasons why you may or may not want to cancel your GRE score. The most likely one is that you think you did badly, and you don’t want schools to see that score. You plan to take it again anyway, and you only want schools to see a higher score rather than both a higher score and a poor earlier attempt. 

While understandable, in many cases this is not a valid fear, as it’s based on a misunderstanding of ETS’s policies. ETS allows you to send only the scores you want to programs to which you’re applying. It’s called ScoreSelect, and here’s what the ETS website says about it: 

The ScoreSelect® option lets you decide which test scores to send to the institutions you designate. On test day, as part of your four free score reports, you can send scores from your most recent test administration or from all administrations of the General Test taken in the last five years. After test day, you can send scores from your Most Recent, All or Any specific test administration(s) for a fee when ordering Additional Score Reports. Just remember, scores for a test administration must be reported in their entirety.

Let’s unpack what this means, because it can be a little confusing. On test day, after you finish taking the test on the computer (this does not apply to a paper-based test, for which you of course cannot see your scores immediately), you’ll see your Verbal and Quant scores. You will then be offered the option to send your scores to up to four schools for free, and you’ll be given two options: to send only the test score that you just got or all of your test scores from the last five years. You can also decline to send your score to anyone and choose to do so later—but later, you’ll pay $27 per score report sent.

Here’s the upside of waiting: You get more options. Instead of just sending only your most recent score or all of your scores from the last five years, you can choose which test scores you want to send. In sum, as long as you wait and pay for your score reports instead of sending them for free on test day, you can pick and choose which scores schools see. Given this option, there’s little reason to cancel before you even know your score because there’s no cost to finding out; you can simply not send it to your program(s) if it’s bad. 

However, there’s a big caveat: Some programs do require that you send all GRE scores from all times you’ve taken it. It’s up to you to research the programs to which you’re applying so that you know if this is the case. Under this condition, and I would say only under this condition, you might consider canceling your score if you know you performed very poorly—as in, you got sick during the exam, or skipped a full half-section, etc.

The takeaway on canceling your GRE score

As with everything else involving the GRE, I can’t stress enough the importance of doing your homework by researching precisely what the programs to which you’re applying require. If any of them requires that you send all of your scores, canceling may not be a terrible idea—only if you’re certain that it went very poorly. If none of them require that you send all of your scores, given the ScoreSelect option, there isn’t a reason to cancel. 

RELATED: What You Do Not Need to Know for the GRE

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Mary Green gre essay

Mary Richter is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Nashville, Tennessee. Mary is one of those weirdos who loves taking standardized tests, and she has been teaching them for 15 years. When she’s not teaching the LSAT or GRE for ManhattanPrep, she’s writing novels under the last name Adkins. You can find them wherever you buy books. Check out Mary’s upcoming GRE prep offerings here!