Cancel, Withdraw, or Just Do it?

Mark Robin

I am in a bit of a quandary and open to any thoughts. I was scheduled for the June 10th and wanted to schedule for October - for whatever reason I was unable to change the date and I am now stuck for the June 10 which I am not ready for. That leaves me with the following possibilities and I am trying to assess the implications of each.

1. Withdraw - I lose the money on the fee but so be it, at least I haven't wasted one of the few exams were allowed to take

2. Take the exam and cancel the result just to get the experience of trying the exam - question, can we see a result before we cancel?

3. Take it just for the experience and do not worry about it, rebook the 2nd in October?

I have till a few days before June 10 to decide, any thoughts welcome. I have studied a lot but just do not feel ready and still had a lot of material to still go through.

Quinn Nguyen

Please, please don't do #3. Take the LSAT only when you're ready. By "ready" I mean you feel you have put as much time/effort in this test as possible/are as close to your target score as you are ever going to get. Pushing it to October won't make much of a difference, as ~50% of applications are turned in mid-November.

My two cents (as someone who's had to make this decision before) is to withdraw, lose the money, and leave your record intact. It's better to have one stellar score in October rather than two disparate (one average/not your best, one stellar).

Quinn Nguyen

I'd also choose #3 over #2. Your "cancels" are precious. Use it only when you prepared as much as you can and still faced some weird issue on test day. In my opinion, one cancel on your record looks okay to admissions. Two cancels gets them suspicious.

And no, you cannot see results before canceling.

J.Y. Ping

I'd save the "cancels" for out of your control things like you get sick.

I think the "experience the LSAT" argument is weak. You get really good experiences at the LSAT time and time again by taking timed, proctored LSATs.

Mark Tenorio

#2 and #3 kinda seem the same.

Can't you just do it and cancel it immediately if you have no other choice but to take it or withdraw?

Mark Robin

Thank you to all, I was leaning towards the withdraw anyway and after reviewing the commentary and my options, I withdrew this morning. And quite frankly, notwithstanding the loss of the fee, I feel much more relaxed knowing I have the time to do this properly. This is an excellent forum and glad it offers the opportunity to discuss so many things that might also help other students.

lmallette4

I cancelled in December because my practice test scores were not high enough, and am taking it in June. I'm feeling pretty good about it, but I wish I had stumbled across 7Sage earlier than late April!

Mark Tenorio

Yeah me too. I had no idea what to do or how to prepare for the LSAT and just looked on amazon for LSAT prep books and referred to TLS post "advice on how to score 160+". I noticed that a lot of people referred to powerscore books.

I bought them, read them over (twice) and then took my first PT and got nearly half wrong. I was considering a class but I was a little skeptical. Then I saw someone make a post about online courses. Usually at my university, people say they didn't really learn anything using online classes, but I think it was because they didn't apply themselves to learn the material. To be honest, I wasn't sure about 7sage because of the word "online". But one of the people in that TLS thread said to just start a free account and find out for yourself and that is what I did and never regretted. If I had to pick a favorite video, it would be the one about the principle question where J.Y. said all that categorization was all BS which was what the PS books were basically doing.