Should I cancel?

[Nashville_14]

Hello,

Hope all is well with you. I just finished taking the October Flex test and I am unsure if I should cancel my score. I received a 164 on the August Flex test and was hoping for a score jump with this October exam. Unfortunately I do not have a good read on how I did as I found the exam very difficult and think there is a chance that I did worse than last time. If I think that I did worse than my previous 164 should I cancel or will it not raise any alarm bells to schools to see my score drop?

Thanks!

[Dave Killoran]

Before doing that, let's talk about how your test went. Describe it for me, talk about your sections, and give your perception of how many you might have answered correctly in each section. Let' see if you would get close to 164 before pulling the trigger. Thanks!

[Nashville_14]

I took the 10/4 afternoon exam and found the games section to be a bit more difficult than expected, particularly the last game about assigning machines to employees. Unfortunately after the exam, I realized a key inference I missed and I think it is very likely I missed 3 or 4 questions on that game alone. The other games I thought were fair and only think I missed 1 between all of them.

Reading comp. is a tough section for me to predict. It’s my weakest section (I usually miss 5 on practice exams). For this particular exam I felt pretty good about 3 of the passages but didn’t have much time for the comparative passage which I left for last. I would think it is safe to assume I missed anywhere from 4-6 on this section.

Logical reasoning I thought was middle of the road. I had to guess on 2 questions so I would imagine I missed ~4 on this section.

With the help of your course and books, I had been scoring consistently in the high 160s on my PTs before both the August and October exams, but I seem to get a bit of test anxiety for the actual tests. Thank you very much for your time!

[Dave Killoran]

Great, thanks for the additional info! So, breaking that down, we get:

LG: -4 to -5

RC: -4 to -6

LR: -4

Total: -12 to -15

While we can't be certain of the scaling on your test yet, based on a middle of the road scaling you'd be looking at something right around your 164. It really depends on thin margins here, so it's hard for me to be more precise. If this is the case, I'd likely keep the score

Thanks!

[Nashville_14]

I really appreciate the response! One final question, let’s say hypothetically it is worse by a handful of points than the 164, is this something that would hurt my application/something I need to write an addendum for? Thank you very much!!

[Jeremy Press]

Hi Nashville,

No to both questions. It won't hurt your application, and you won't need an addendum. Because of the incentives in the admissions game, law schools are making their admissions decisions based on your high score, whenever you received it. For a little more comfort that such is the case, check out this blog post, and also check out the comments section where we've given the answer I'm giving here: https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/do-law ... igh-score/.

I hope this helps!

[Nashville_14]

Thank you so much!