Should I Cancel My LSAT Score?
This post was written by Emily Madan, a Manhattan Prep LSAT instructor.
You spent so much time studying, analyzing, and reviewing. It all comes down to one day and one three-digit score. The pressure to perform your best is intense, so now the question is: Should you keep or cancel your score? Let’s dive into the questions you’re asking yourself and what factors should influence your decision.
Should I Cancel My LSAT Score?
Probably not. Most schools only use your top LSAT score for admissions, so having a lower score doesn’t generally hurt you. A few schools do look at all your LSAT scores, but most just want to see a trend of improvement if you retake. If you’re applying to one of the rare schools that still averages LSAT scores, you’ll want to cancel more readily.
Even though there may not be a practical harm to keeping a lower LSAT score, no one wants to have a disappointing score on their record, so you may be considering canceling for your own peace of mind, or even to force yourself to try harder and do better next time. We still recommend some caution when deciding to cancel your score. Why?
You don’t know your score!
The LSAT is legit a hard test. Everyone walks out feeling disappointed. Everyone knows they missed some questions or didn’t understand a game or passage. Most people don’t feel they had enough time. These feelings don’t mean you actually did poorly. Instead, they indicate that you really care about this test, which is great! You invested time and effort into doing well, so give yourself the benefit of the doubt and wait to see how you did. If you cancel your score, you’ll never know whether your hard work paid off.
Typically, only consider canceling your LSAT score if something went wrong. Not just that your mind started to wander on the third passage, but rather that something fundamentally problematic happened. Like a fire alarm caused an evacuation and the test wasn’t finished until 6pm. Or you had a panic attack and couldn’t work for 20 minutes of testing time. Or you came down with a horrible flu the day before. In these cases, you can be fairly confident that your score won’t reflect your actual ability on that day and retaking is very likely to result in a higher score. Otherwise, adopt a wait-and-see approach.
When Should I Retake the LSAT?
You didn’t do as well as you wanted to the first time, so how do you know when you’ll be ready for a second (or third) attempt? To figure that out, ask yourself three questions:
- How much time do you have to get ready?
- How much have you already studied?
- How far are you from your goal score?
If you want to apply in the fall, most schools require you to have an LSAT score by the December prior. This post entitled When Should I Take the LSAT? may help to remind you of what external factors influence your deadline. On average, studying takes somewhere between three and five months with about 15 to 20 hours of work each week. If you have less time than that, either expect a smaller than average score improvement or anticipate studying much more intensely during your shortened time frame to achieve the same goal.
But you’ve already studied. Can you just subtract that time from five months to see how much more time is required? Maybe. If you’ve been improving steadily and can continue to keep studying as you have, you could expect that trend to continue. For example, if you’re only halfway through a course and can just keep going or if you’ve been taking and analyzing practice exams as your primary means of studying, and each time you’ve improved by about 1-2 points, then just keep plugging along.
However, that’s not the typical scenario. Many students have “finished” a course of study by the time they take the LSAT, so they can’t simply continue. Instead, consider how much work you’ve already put in. Did you complete all the assigned homework and deeply review it each week? Or are there lots of assignments you could go back to and cover more thoroughly? The more specific opportunities you have, the faster you’ll be able to see results. If you’ve already thoroughly studied and you still have a long way to go, it’s going to take longer to find and take advantage of your opportunities. Give yourself at least a couple of months to make that progress.
Finally, consider the distance to your goal. It goes without saying that the further your current score is from your goal score, the more work you’ll have to do, but it’s more nuanced than that. As your baseline score gets higher, it becomes increasingly hard to improve by the same amount of points. So if you started at 150, getting to 155 takes work, but likely not an unreasonable amount. Pushing further to 160 will require more work and more time than getting to 155 did. Then finally reaching the 165 mark will take a huge amount of work.
What this means practically speaking is that just because increasing your score ten points took you three months, don’t think that increasing your score an additional ten points is likely to take you an additional three months. It’s much more likely to take you five or more.
If your plan is to just keep studying as long as you need to hit that elusive goal score, at some point you’re going to have to take the leap and register for your next attempt. When Should I Stop Studying for the LSAT? can help you make that decision.
How do I Study for an LSAT Retake?
If you’re in the (relatively rare) position of taking your first LSAT while on a continuously positive trajectory, then just keep doing what you’re doing. Most of us at some point hit a plateau or are not seeing the gains we want at the rate we need. That’s when it’s time to try a different strategy.
When You Need Less Expert Guidance
If you’re looking for a relatively small improvement and/or you have lots of time to study, you can get away with less guided instruction and more independent study. Create a study calendar to keep yourself on track and focused. Make use of the practice tests available and consider investing in some guided self-study, such as strategy guides or video lessons that can help ensure you’re not missing any key tips or tricks. Use tools that are somewhat different from what you used to study the first time.
The greatest obstacle to self-study is often the lack of accountability. Now is the time for a self-assessment of your typical study process and brutal honesty about your flaws. Are you a procrastinator? Someone who reads to finish and not for comprehension? Someone who rarely reviews past just seeing whether you got the problem right or wrong? Someone who will lose steam three weeks into studying? Be proactive about your potential roadblocks.
Create systems to prevent these problems from ever arising. Consider forming a study group to stay motivated. Add specific dates to review completed tests to your study schedule. Join an LSAT class to get assignments with due dates and a teacher you’re accountable to. Do whatever needs to be done to get through the long and challenging process of studying for the LSAT. For inspiration and learning science about how to study most efficiently, check out this post on How to Study for the LSAT.
When You Need More Expert Guidance
If you’re hoping for a big score improvement and/or you don’t have much time to study, it’s time to reach out for some help. At a minimum, sign up for an LSAT course. If you’re planning to retake the LSAT within eight weeks, you may need to sign up for an accelerated course, since most standard ones will take longer than that. Look into what tools the course may offer specifically for someone on an accelerated timeline or looking for a substantial score increase.
If you’ve already taken a course or if you’re hoping to see a particularly big score improvement, look into one-on-one instruction. In addition to the personalized lessons, an instructor will be able to analyze your strengths and weaknesses more effectively than you will and may be able to point out opportunities for quick score improvement that you didn’t realize you should pursue. If you need fast results, prioritize efficiency.
How do I Prepare for the Digital Test?
The LSAT is now delivered on a tablet with a booklet of blank paper for your notes. The good news is that the digital LSAT is mostly the same as a paper-based LSAT. The essay is now completed at home, but everything else is as similar to the paper-based test as possible. This is great news because it means all the practice tests, guidebooks, and curriculum that walks you through the LSAT are still great starting points. Let’s focus on the tweaks you should make to adjust to the modern format. If you want a detailed explanation of what’s changed in the digital LSAT, read Digital LSAT Test Changes in 2019.
What Should I Do Differently?
When doing practice tests and questions on paper, practice your annotation as if you were using a tablet. Don’t write notes in the margins of passages. Limit your mark up of the test to underlining and highlighting text, flagging questions, and eliminating or selecting answer choices. Everything else should go on a separate sheet of scratch paper. Practice organizing your scratch paper so that you can easily go back to review questions.
Keep in mind that you’ll write on the tablet with a stylus or your finger, but you’ll write on the scratch paper with a pen. Don’t waste time continuously switching back and forth from stylus to pen. Instead, practice using almost exclusively scratch paper, or exclusively highlighting and underlining in the test booklet within a section. Different sections should have different approaches. Logic games will be performed almost entirely on your scratch paper. Reading comprehension, however, may be almost entirely highlighted and underlined. Try different techniques with different passages, games, and LR questions to see what works best for you.
How Should You Make Use of the Digit Practice LSATs?
There aren’t yet many published digital LSATs available to practice with, so use them sparingly.
First, save the practice exams until relatively close to your test day. Practice the content and basic strategy of the LSAT on paper. Once you’re about ready to take the LSAT, you can try out the digital format to figure out how to transfer your developed skills to the digital format.
Treat your first digital practice test as an experiment. You may find that underlining is more challenging than you expected and you need to increase the font for accuracy. It’s okay to adjust the strategies you’ve been developing, as long as you’re doing so in an intentional way. Even though you can’t pause the test mid-section, if something’s not working, step back and figure out a solution. You’re not using the first test as a realistic practice, but rather to adapt your techniques through trial and error. Feel free to end the test to give yourself the time you need to adjust. Just take a screenshot of your answers because they’ll be lost when you open the section back up.
Once you’ve adapted your strategy to fit the digital LSAT, treat the remaining digital exams as full-length tests. These tests are fairly recently released, so use them as your last few practice exams before the real thing. Whenever possible, use a tablet and stylus instead of a computer and mouse. Your practice should be as close to test day conditions as possible.
When you retake the test, turn the tools the digital LSAT offers to your advantage. Make sure you review all of our suggestions in our Tips and Strategies for the Digital LSAT post. Give yourself the time and resources you need to boost your score and make the second LSAT attempt the best!