NOTE: shortly after we published this letter, LSAC agreed to our request and thereafter fixed LSAT score release times to a specific date and time that is announced well in advance. Thank you LSAC!
Hi LSAC,
I hope everyone there is doing well! We just went through the June LSAT score release and I wanted to share some of my thoughts and the thoughts of many students I spoke to. Let me start by saying that we appreciate you moving up the score release timeline a bit and then (sort of) sticking to the announced release date. That definitely helped ease concerns! However, you also made a decision this past round that I think will have many adverse effects going forward. Because of that, I’d like to suggest you make a change for future release dates.
First, more or less sticking to the announced date was awesome! Everyone who took the test was able to delay their rising anxiety a little later than usual! For that, we thank you. One suggestion though. Do you think maybe your Twitter account could reaffirm the release date in the days prior to the official date? You have a lengthy history of releasing scores early. While everyone hopes this new change is permanent, many people are slow to believe you’ve changed. Putting out an official announcement on each of the several days before the official date would really help people believe scores will come out when you say they will come out.
Second, let’s talk about the time you chose for the release. 12:04 AM Eastern time. Hey, I get it. It was just barely Friday in Newtown, PA where your headquarters are. You probably thought it was fair to release them as soon as possible on the date you selected! Even though it was Thursday in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones. You might have even had a chuckle about surprising people with such an early release because you’ve never done it at that hour before. This one time, you get a free pass because very few expected scores at that hour.
But now you’ve set a precedent, and that’s a very bad thing for a lot of people. Why? Because now everyone who takes an LSAT will expect scores then. This means they’ll stay up until then to see what they got. Unfortunately, score releases don’t work in a way where every score comes out at the exact same time. Instead, it can take over 12 hours for all the scores to come out, meaning you’ve inadvertently relegated a lot of people to stay up all night desperately waiting for their score. I know this will happen because I had a message from a student in the middle of the night crying because her score hadn’t arrived yet and she was exhausted from waiting. To avoid that (and the even worse scenario where the release doesn’t start right at midnight, but is pushed back a few hours later for some reason), here’s the solution we suggest:
- Release scores as close to noon Eastern on the official date as possible. That way, the majority of test takers, who are in the US and Canada, will be up and ready for their results.
- Use your official channels to tell everyone beforehand the time you hope to release scores. A quick tweet the day before that says, “We hope to release scores tomorrow as close to noon as possible. Good luck everyone!” would go a long way toward creating goodwill for you. As a bonus, it will also ease the fear and anxiety around the appearance of these life-changing results.
So, that’s it! We love the direction you are taking with the attempt to be more open and clear about the release, but you can do even better. And, you can also save thousands of people from frantically hitting F5 throughout the night as they wait for their results.
Thanks for listening and good luck!
Boo PS says
Boo. Thumbs down and y’all suck. Many of us would appreciate the score ASAP, we are stressed about apps anyway so why would we want to hold off longer because PowerScore wanted to advocate for the teacher to assign more homework and hold off on grading. I would call you all dweebs if I could, but that would be unnecessarily unkind, much like asking LSAC to take more time to release scores. We are grown! And lived through a pandemic, take it back! I want joy!
Dave Killoran says
Haha, I enjoyed your reply 🙂
I know it is easy to think you want scores back asap–and thus have them simply show up unannounced–but I can tell you from experience that you don’t. First, I think you are assuming scores would come back earlier than the stated date. Historically, that’s not always the case. And with no deadline in place, LSAC could easily make you wait longer! So, having that set release date and time actually puts the burden on them to get it done on a deadline. Second, there’s an actual comfort in knowing when scores coming exactly. In the old days, it was chaos for sometimes weeks while everyone waited. Each day people would frantically refresh their LSAC accounts desperately hoping to see their score. The psychic damage being done was huge, and there is no part of me that wishes to return to those days (and I’m not alone, a number of other heads of LSAT companies have agreed with me). Students themselves from that time complained mightily about how dumb LSAC’s system was. It’s easy to think it would be better in the old way, but unless you lived it, you have no idea how frustrating it was. And, for what it’s worth, we actually did huge engagement around each general score release period so the new system doesn’t benefit us at all, and actually hurts us in a sense. Still, no way I’d go back 🙂