Will LSAC consider my withdrawals at a foreign university (prior to transferring) to be fails? Forum

[Bouvier10]

I am an overseas applicant. I first attended a 3-year BA course in the Middle East, and disliked it. Our curriculum was fixed, and thus there was a set list of classes that needed to be taken for each major, each semester.

At the beginning of my freshman year, I applied to a top university in the UK, where I was accepted at the beginning of my second semester. The acceptance was on the basis of my high school grades, and the university would not accept any transfer credit.

Thus, I opted to go work instead of continuing to study towards my original degree. However, two classes were particularly interesting to me and I continued to take them.

My university did not have a "withdraw" policy for classes, as they were fixed for each term. Thus, I needed to stay enrolled in order to continue to attend the two classes that were of interest to me. Given that I wasn't thinking about US law school and that the UK didn't care, this didn't seem like an issue.

I thus took exams in the two courses that were of interest to me, and then formally withdrew from my university prior to the last examination date for the remaining courses.

Per our university policy, if one doesn't attend any of the examination dates for a class, one will fail it and receive a 0 which reads "incomplete". However, as I withdrew prior to the last examination date, my transcript merely reads "Not yet graded" for those classes. Under the explanation of "Not yet graded" in the grading key, it explains that this terminology indicates that a student has "not yet received a grade / a student has not taken the exam".

Normally, this terminology is only printed on mid-semester transcripts before a student has taken the relevant exam. However, given that I withdrew prior to our final available exam date, such terminology is on my permanent transcript. Such a policy exists in order to ensure that the university does not artificially lower the GPA of students who withdraw, by failing them for all of the classes they haven't completed in a given semester prior to their withdrawal.

In such a circumstance, will LSAC likely count such classes as having been failed, or will they be ignored? I am aware that I will not get a GPA calculation, but am concerned that this will affect what would otherwise be a "superior" evaluation.