Should You Cancel Your GRE Score?
When you take the GRE, you’ll have the option to cancel your score. This might seem like a great option, but like the GRE calculator, it’s more of a trap than a benefit. The catch is that you have to decide whether to cancel your GRE score before you see it. Once you see your GRE score, you can’t cancel it; and if you cancel it, you’ll never know what it was. In this post, I’d like to tell you a short story and a long story about this score-canceling option.
The short story is: don’t cancel your GRE score. Period.
The long story is that there are many reasons why canceling your GRE score is a terrible idea:
- For one, the option appears at the end of an almost 2-hour exam that leaves you emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted — which is exactly when you DON’T want to make critical and irreversible life-altering decisions.
- Another problem with the option is that the fundamental logic behind it doesn’t make sense. If the GRE went so terribly that you need to cancel your score…then how did you make it all the way to the end of the test? Just about any legitimate reason to cancel your score would stop you from seeing the score-canceling option in the first place, because you wouldn’t have made it through the test.
- The main reason many GRE students feel an urge to cancel their score is that the test “felt hard.” Or occasionally: “it felt REALLY hard.” And that’s NOT a good reason to cancel your score, no matter how many “reallys” you tack in front of the word “hard.” The GRE is a hard test. It’s long, it covers a wide intellectual area, and it adapts to your test-taking ability and throws you problems at the upper reaches of your skill level.
Many GRE test takers come out of the test thinking they bombed it; but when they get their scores back, they end up making a higher score on the actual GRE than any of their practice tests. People are not good at judging their own GRE performance, which is why you need to undergo an epic catastrophe — “I fell ill and left half of two sections blank” — in order to justify a score cancellation.
Keeping a GRE Score vs. Sending It to Schools
Keeping a GRE score does not require sending it to a school. With ScoreSelect, test takers can choose which test administrations to report:
- On test day: Up to four score reports are included in the test fee. For each recipient, test takers can send the current administration or all reportable administrations from the past five years. They can also choose not to send scores that day.
- After test day: Additional score reports require a fee. Test takers can select their most recent administration, all reportable administrations, or specific administrations from the past five years.
Waiting provides more selection options, but it means paying for reports that could have been sent at no additional cost on test day.
Check Each Program’s GRE Reporting Requirements
Some programs require applicants to submit scores from every GRE administration. Applicants should confirm those requirements before testing rather than assume that ScoreSelect overrides a program’s admissions policy.
If a program requires all scores and a serious disruption affected performance, cancellation may deserve consideration. When programs permit selected scores, keeping the result generally leaves more options available.
Can Canceled GRE Scores Be Reinstated?
Test takers can request reinstatement of voluntarily canceled GRE scores through their ETS account within 60 days after the test date. A reinstatement fee applies.
Canceled scores are not available to view or send unless reinstated, and cancellation does not refund the test fee. It also applies to the entire administration; individual section scores cannot be canceled separately.
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GRE Score or GPA: What’s the Biggest Application Killer?
So you don’t cancel your GRE score, and then you get your score back and it’s lower than you were hoping for. What do you do? Will the low GRE score prevent you from being admitted to graduate school? There is no one-size-fits-all formula for getting into grad school—but by thinking smart and planning out a timeline suited to your unique candidacy, you’ll be gathering confidence and knowledge that will really pay off when it comes time to apply.
Two of the most crucial grad school application components are your GRE score and GPA. Together, these make up the quantifiable aspects of your candidacy, and they both go a long way toward ensuring the rest of your application gets the attention it deserves.
