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Withdrawals as "Non-Punitive"
CardsnHogz
Alum Member
Hello everyone.
Long story short. Life happened and it took me 6 years to graduate. I had multiple semesters I had to withdraw from which resulted in 36 hours of W's.
The LSAC has calculated these W's as F's and my 3.5 gpa is now a 2.62.
On this page https://www.lsac.org/aboutlsac/policies/transcript-summarization#excluded under the heading Grades Excluded from Conversion, the very first point on the list is "Withdraw, Withdraw/Pass—only if the issuing school considers the grade nonpunitive"
So my question is, if my final transcript shows a 3.5 wouldn't these withdrawals be non-punitive? I am understanding the word punitive as my school would use these W's in my GPA calculation as zero.
I have also looked at the site https://www.lsac.org/transcriptkeys/igugs-search.aspx
My school has this listed:
Excluded From Both LSAC and School☼ Calculation
☼Passing grades from systems with fewer than three passing grades (e.g., High Pass/Pass/Fail) are not necessarily excluded from the school's GPA calculation.
Unconverted: CR,P
Omitted: AU,GNR,I,IP,NG,NGR,NR,W,WN
Nonpunitive: (This section is BLANK)
So the Nonpunitive section is blank but W's are listed under Omitted. Maybe I am answering my own question here but do I have a shot at challenging the LSAC's GPA calculation?
Thank you in advance and good luck to everyone here.
PS. I'm kind of starting here to feel the situation out and will contact my registrar soon.
Comments
I'm going to tag a very helpful member of these boards that might have some insight: @LSATcantwin
You definitely have a shot, you'll have to provide the LSAC proof that your undergraduate school considers those W's non-punitive. I have heard of people, for example, getting a dean's approval and sending that to LSAC. In any case, check with your school first to ensure that the W's that you do have are actually non-punitive.
Thank you both. I have dug a little deeper and looked at the Key to the Online Academic Summary Report listed under my academic summary report on LSAC.
This is under the Nonpunitive Course Credit Hours heading:
..."if the issuing school considers the grade nonpunitive (not included in the GPA)"
So that is their definition of nonpunitive. These W's were not calculated into my GPA from my school so that sounds pretty to close to what they are calling nonpunitive if not exactly the same. Calling the registrar now. Will update if anyone is interested. Thanks again.
.
It is definitely the W's. My first year's GPA, in which I withdrew from 9 hours but completed 21 (going from memory here) is calculated by LSAC as a 1.0 which is completely inaccurate. The only way they could have reached that number is by including the W's as F's. (I am going to acquire my transcripts and do my best to evaluate this but I am absolutely positive I of the 20ish hours I earned that first year were all A's and B's and a C or two).
I contacted the registrar and the head registrar is going to get back to me. I'm not holding my breath on this but dang a 2.62 really sucks.
Glad to hear your situation was reconciled.
I'm glad you posted this so that I make the time to potentially deal with this issue! I completely withdrew from a semester and have two other Ws (from 2010 to 2018). If those were calculated into my GPA, I'd be screwed! I already have a bad 10-credit semester that lowered my gpa almost 0.12 points... which is a lot when you're looking at schools with averages around 3.70-3.80.
I have two vws on my transcript .. does this also apply to Canadian schools (punitive ) ?
If you don't already have it, you should make sure to get an unofficial transcript from everywhere you attended for yourself, so you can see what all is on it. If it's true that your school didn't include those in your GPA calculation, then it seems that would certainly be a case for those being non-punitive. But I'd make sure to get a copy of the transcript, call your school and see if someone can tell you for sure, then call LSAC and tell them your situation, ask what they need in order to review it again.
I called the Ontario application centre and was told for uwindsor they do not use it against your cgpa
My understanding is that a withdrawal (passing-- definitely not failing!) doesn't count in your gpa. I think it would be weird if that didn't apply in Canada. Will you let me know if you find any Canadian schools that hold the withdrawals against you in your cgpa? It should be standardized across all Canadian schools, but just in case...
I would definitely recommend calling them with specific questions. My vw were before the deadline . When I called the Ontario application centre she asked me what school specifically , looked it up and told me no it doesn’t. (Uwindsor).
For University of Windsor a vw with no mark only appears on your transcript if you removed yourself before the deadline
Also @CardsnHogz - please keep us updated! It's always helpful to have these threads to reference once folks figure things out. I'll be very curious to see what happens, and hoping it's in your favor! It sounds like it should be, but LSAC can be tricky to deal with.
Yeah.. sounds like an error on their part. If it wasn't punitive or a failing withdraw, there shouldn't be a problem. I had one W (decided after a couple weeks that the class just wasn't for me), and it was not held against me by LSAC.
I figured I would update this....... wasn't planning on it being several years later, but I wound up having 15 hours of F's dropped and changed to non-punitive W's AND I caught an error LSAC made in my calculations. Went up over half a gpa point, so it basically saved me.
I advice to check your transcripts and LSAC's interpretations of them! Transcript analysis/and gpa calculation can be incredibly tedious and boring, and these people get thousands of transcripts, so mistakes happen.