Here’s a scenario that you may, fingers crossed, never experience yourself—but one for which it’s still worth having a game plan just in case it DOES come up:
The proctor/BlueBook app says “Time!” And with that, your Digital SAT or ACT is over. You haven’t seen your score yet—yet you’re already sure you MAJORLY mucked up this test sitting. You typically finish the Math section with spare time left in the tank, but today, you’d barely clicked on your final answer before time was up. You didn’t even answer every Science question. And Reading…yikes. It felt way tougher than your practice tests. All in all, the past two hours felt like one of those awful nightmares where you’ve entirely forgotten to study for a big exam.
You’re just SURE you bombed the whole thing. Doesn’t it make the most sense simply to cancel your SAT or ACT score and not have to deal with even SEEING how badly you did?
While it IS an option to make sure your test never gets graded, it’s not one to be taken lightly. You need to make that decision in a tranquil, clear-headed state rather than in the freaked-out doom spiral that it can be easy to fall into after a challenging test experience.
Fortunately, “tranquil and clear-headed” is my middle name! (It’s an uncommon middle name, ok?!) After all, it’s my job to help any standardized test-taker who walks into my digital office stay calm and collected during their ACT or SAT…so that they can get the score they’ve been dreaming of.
So, this post is going to help you learn to tell the difference between test-day situations where it IS, versus IS NOT, the most strategic choice to cancel your score. Should a tough exam sitting come your way, I want to ensure you make the decision that best benefits your college admissions strategy.
Article Contents
1. Watch this article as a video
2. When should you cancel your ACT or SAT score?
A. Good reasons to cancel your DSAT or ACT score
B. Bad reasons to cancel your DSAT or ACT score
3. A true story about why you don’t always need to cancel your score
4. Conclusion
Watch this article as a video:
How to know when you should cancel your SAT or ACT score
Here’s the quick-and-dirty rule for this question: it only makes sense to cancel a score in situations that border on emergencies—because they’re the ones that are likeliest to have significantly tanked your score. Let me give you some examples below. (And before you ask: yes, those are actual TRUE stories from past students of mine! Don’t worry, though—I helped them get through that rough day and move onwards and upwards to significantly higher scores next time!)
Reasons to erase your SAT or ACT score
You got sick and excused yourself from the Math section to throw up in the bathroom—where you stayed for 20 minutes.
You arrived at the test LATE and missed huge chunks of a section—or even more than one section!
A medical or family emergency came up and you had to leave the exam early, without completing it.
You fell ASLEEP in the middle of the test and didn’t finish it. (Which is why it’s important to get a full eight hours of sleep, and to think strategically about your alarm time, the day before the test!)
You were passing a kidney stone, which caused you horrific pain throughout the test, meaning you could barely remember what year it was, let alone finish all of the sections, let alone answer those questions correctly.
Your calculator battery died at the beginning of the ACT Math section (because you forgot to test your batteries the day before, whoops!) and there were MANY problems in the section that you couldn’t solve without it.
You were taking the paper ACT and 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 to begin with—whatever the particulars of the pencil fail, you had no way to fill in those answer bubbles in a way that the Scantron could read and accurately score.
Your laptop or tablet died in the middle of your Digital ACT or SAT, and neither you nor the proctor had an extra device or a charging cord for you to use. Crikey!
After catastrophes like these, you actually know that you can’t possibly have gotten anywhere near the score you’d otherwise earn—because a very unfortunate event 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 Digital SAT.
So far, you might be nodding along and thinking, “Well, that’s not TOO surprising. If I’m experiencing, like, bodily harm during my SAT, of course I’m going to cancel the score.”
But keep reading, because this next piece of advice is what many students don’t know.
Scenarios where it's NOT a good idea to cancel your SAT or ACT score:
Some questions drew on topics you’re certain you’ve never studied.
The Science/Math/Reading/English section seemed way harder than usual.
You didn’t answer a few questions in a section that you typically finish in plenty of time.
The Reading and Writing modules of your practice tests have always been a piece of cake for you—but this time, you couldn’t make any sense out of what one of the passages was saying.
You felt more anxious than you ever have while taking an exam.
You were distracted by the girl next to you, who was humming throughout the whole test. You’re convinced her rendition of Hamilton distracted you so much you got a few questions wrong.
You left the testing center with a bad feeling in your bones about your performance.
…do you see the difference between the two lists? It’s a matter of emergency vs. discomfort, crisis vs. occasional mistake.
Still convinced YOUR situation means you should opt out of getting your test scored? Maybe this story will help you make the right call:
Why you should think twice before deleting your standardized test score
Recently, a one-on-one tutoring student of mine—let’s call her Alexis—called me right after she got out of her SAT. She was having a meltdown.
“Kristina, the Math section was a MESS! It felt so much harder than normal. I had no idea know how to even approach two of the questions, and just guessed. Also, several of the Reading Claims questions were super hard, and I don’t think I really understood those texts. Shouldn’t I just cancel my score?! My friend Brianna 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 Alexis, I determined that the only concrete things that had happened during the test were that there were a few Math and Reading and Writing questions that Alexis more or less guessed on—and this had her in tears because she usually has plenty of time to truly work each question. All of the other alleged disasters were subjective: like how “tough” sections, questions, or passages were, and how she “felt” about the experience overall.
I convinced Alexis NOT to cancel her score. This was the most strategic choice for her for the following reasons:
If she thought the Math section was unbelievably “hard”...that probably meant that a LOT of other test-takers did that day, too! Which meant the curve would more than likely be “easier” than usual.
If she thought the Reading texts were harder than usual...that same curve logic applies here, too! Her practice tests had showed that Reading and Writing were typically where Alexis’s strengths lay, so she’d likely STILL place in the top percentiles, even if she missed a few more questions than usual.
Most of the colleges on Alexis’s application list used Superscoring. This means that they would accept her highest individual Math and Reading + Writing scores across different test dates. She’d already locked in a 770 on the Reading & Writing on a past test sitting, so who really cared if her R+W section didn’t go down quite as easily 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 Alexis’s desired schools permitted 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.
She needed to keep up her momentum! If Alexis canceled her scores when there’s even a chance to learn something useful from the questions she’d answered, she would likely delay her testing timeline. I know from experience that students in this situation often fall into “test prep limbo,” never again managing to gather the energy and willpower to fully dive back into studying before the next test date.
There’s a finite number of test dates for the SAT and the ACT. Unless you were struck by a true cataclysm, you should at least learn what score you got before throwing it out altogether. You’ll never get to see your score if you cancel.
Do you know what ended up happening? Alexis followed my advice and did NOT cancel her score. She ended up receiving a 730 in Math—the highest she’d EVER gotten! Her Reading + Writing 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!)
Conclusion
It would not be helpful to your college admissions timeline if you removed yourself from a potentially not-that-bad score just because you’re anxious or misunderstand how the test works. However, I don’t want to dismiss the fact that there DO exist some scenarios where it’s the best move to cancel your score. They’re rare, but real.
So, if one of those serious misfortunes does befall you, you can check out my instructions on how to cancel your SAT score or how to cancel your ACT score. I make it easy and quick.
If you’ve finished reading today’s post and feel like you need help quickly making this decision about a test you recently took, you can get my expert thoughts on your personal situation by reserving a one-on-one meeting with me.
