Let me paint a picture of a scenario that SAT- and ACT-takers encounter from time to time. It’s a situation that I hope you’ll never experience yourself—but one that’s nonetheless worth knowing how to navigate:
You just finished sitting for the SAT or ACT, and you’re already convinced you bombed it. You normally finish the Writing/English in plenty of time, but today, you’d barely bubbled in your last answer when the proctor announced, “TIME!” You didn’t even finish every Reading question. And the Math? Yikes. It felt way harder than the math on your practice tests, like the questions had been sent from an alternate reality just to throw you off your game.
You feel SURE you screwed up big-time. Isn’t the best move simply to cancel your SAT or ACT score and not have to face a likely disastrous score?
While cancelling your score IS an option, it’s one you need to approach calmly and rationally, rather than in the post-test heat of the moment. And “calmly and rationally” is my middle name! (It’s my job to keep hundreds of standardized test-takers cool, collected, and prepared before their tests, after all.) This post is going to outline the situations where cancelling your SAT or ACT score is the most strategic move—and the ones in which you are better off taking a deep breath and accepting the discomfort of a possibly lower-than-hoped-for score.
Should I cancel my SAT or ACT score?
Here’s the bottom line, pals: canceling a score should be reserved for situations that border on emergencies—because they’re the ones that are likely to seriously have affected your score. Let me give you some examples. (And don’t laugh: those are actual TRUE stories from past students of mine! Don’t worry, though—I helped them bounce back from and move past so that they could snag the scores they were capable of.)
List of reasons you might ACTUALLY want to cancel your SAT or ACT score:
A medical or family emergency came up and you had to leave the exam early, without finishing it.
You arrived at the test LATE and missed huge chunks of a section—or even more than one section!
You fell ASLEEP in the middle of the test and didn’t finish it.
You got sick and excused yourself from the Math section to throw up in the bathroom—where you stayed for 15 minutes.
You were passing a kidney stone, which put you in debilitating pain for the duration of the test, meaning you hardly finished any of the sections.
Your calculator battery died at the beginning of the Math section (because you forgot the check your batteries the day before, whoops) and you couldn’t answer ANY of the section’s questions without it.
Your pencil broke, there was no sharpener, the proctor didn’t have an extra for you to use, or it wasn’t a No. 2 pencil anyway—whatever the exact situation, you had no way to fill in those answer bubbles in a way that the Scantron could read and accurately score.
In catastrophic scenarios like these, you know beyond a doubt that you can’t possibly have gotten anywhere near the score you normally earn because a circumstance prevented you from actually finishing entire sections of the test. THESE are the situations that call for cancelling a score. Especially if you have schools on your list that require you send every test score and that do NOT allow for Score Choice!
In such cases, you can simply tell the proctor during the test, right then and there, that you’d like to cancel your score, and your exam will not even be graded! That’s true of both the ACT and the SAT.
But keep reading, because this next part is just important.
Here are situations in which you should NOT permanently cancel your SAT or ACT score:
You didn’t answer a few questions in a section that you typically finish with time to spare.
There were some questions that covered topics you’re positive you’ve never studied before.
The Grammar/Science/Math/Reading section seemed much harder than usual.
You’ve always aced the Reading sections of your practice tests, but this time, one of the passages was really hard to parse.
You felt more anxious than you’ve ever been while taking a test.
You were distracted by the guy drumming on his desk behind you and are convinced it screwed up your concentration big-time.
You left the testing center with a bad feeling about your performance.
…do you see the difference between the two lists? It’s a matter of emergency vs. unease, crisis vs. slip-up.
Still convinced YOUR situation means you should nix your score? Maybe this story will help you make the right call:
Not too long ago, a tutoring student of mine—let’s call her Micaela—called me after she got out of her ACT. She was freaking out.
“Kristina, the Math section went TERRIBLY! It felt so much harder than normal. I had no idea know how to even approach two of the questions, and just guessed. Also, one of the Reading passages was super hard, and I don’t think I really understood it. Shouldn’t I just cancel my score?! My cousin canceled one of her tests, and she ended up getting the scores she needed the next time she took it.”
After about 15 minutes on the phone with her, I determined that the only concrete things that had happened during the test were that there were a few Math and Reading questions that Micaela more or less guessed on—and this had her in tears because she usually has time to make it through everything. All of the other bad omens were subjective: like how “hard” sections, questions, passages were and how she “felt” about it.
I convinced Micaela NOT to cancel her scores. This was the best call for her for the following reasons:
If she thought the Math section was incredibly “hard”...that probably meant that a LOT of other students did, too! Which meant the curve would more than likely be “easier” than usual.
If she thought a Reading passage was harder than usual...that same curve logic applies here, too! Micaela was a naturally strong reader, so she’d likely STILL be in the top percentiles, even if she missed a few more questions than she usually did.
Many of her schools Superscored. Meaning, they would take her highest Math and highest Verbal across test dates. She’d already locked in a 770 on Verbal on a past test sitting, so who really cared if her Reading section didn’t go as well as usual? Our focus with this most recent test sitting was on raising her Math to 730 so she could Superscore to a 1500.
All but one of the colleges on Micaela’s list accepted Score Choice, meaning that if she truly DID get a very low score, only one admissions committees would ever see it, anyway. She could just elect not to send it to the others.
To keep up her momentum! If Micaela canceled her scores when there’s even a chance to learn something useful from the questions she’d answered, she would have stalled her process. There would be no questions to review later, and she might risk putting herself in “test prep limbo,” never fully re-committing to the process in time for the next test date.
There’s a finite number of test dates for the SAT and the ACT. Unless a real catastrophe struck you, you should at least learn what score you got before putting the kibosh on it. You’ll never see your score if you cancel.
Do you know what ended up happening? Micaela followed my advice and did NOT cancel her score. She ended up receiving a 730 in Math—the highest she’d EVER gotten! Her Verbal wasn’t quite as good as the 770 she already had, but that didn’t matter for her Superscore—she got exactly what she needed to Superscore to a 1500! (And just because, she took the NEXT sitting as well...and got a 1540, Superscoring to a 1550!)
It would be so unfortunate if you missed out on a score that’s better than you fear because of self-doubt, panic, or an incomplete understanding of how the test works. But sometimes there ARE real reasons to cancel your score. So that you’ll be ready if you run into one of those, you can check out pair of posts I wrote on HOW to cancel your SAT score and how to cancel your ACT score! If you read that post and determine that you need expert help in making this decision—quickly!—you can get in touch with me here.
