Here at Georgia Tech, you have until the end of the first week to drop without it appearing on the transcript. If you drop after the last day when you could sign up for a new class, then you get a W (unless you wait even longer and aren't allowed to drop without failing). There are one or 2 classes which don't allow you to drop with a W, since they tend to be overcrowded and they really don't want anyone to take up a slot at the beginning and then drop.
At tech, I believe you can take an Incomplete instead of a W if and only if you drop all your classes (or is it if you withdraw from the school completely?), but that there is no deadline on when you can do that. I'm not sure how it compares as far as transcripts go.
I've taken Ws too often, mostly when I fall behind on a paper or project. The worst was probably dropping Civil Engineering Systems twice, because I hadn't gotten any of the first 3 homework assignments (the first ones are fairly long papers based on really long readings without much time to do them) done (each worth 5% of the grade). I still didn't get those done the third time, but decided to just go on a try for a B. That time the professor had offered 2 extra credit assignments, although at the end of the semester I was really busy with the main project for that class and another class. She made that final exam optional, but since not taking it would make homework a bigger part of the grade I went ahead and was the only one to take it. I ended up getting a B, which I guess I could have done just as easily the first time.
I dropped one class last semester (Civil Materials Lab) due to an annoying policy of making you automatically fail if you miss a single lab or fail to turn in one report (which tend to run over 20 pages in that class). I started on the report for the first lab a bit late and was really sick a few days before it was due, and so never finished. I had thought I could just accept loosing 5% of the grade in the class and focus on doing the rest earlier, but 3 days after the due date I noticed the auto-fail policy and that they won't accept anthing more than 2 days late (it was also 25% of per day late).
(Hmm, that reminds me, I should really be working on my Hydraulics Lab report due Tuesday about now. They have the same auto-fail policy, and the syllabus doesn't say that they accept them late at all. I did manage to get the TA to accept it about 4 hours late for the first report, and anther guy in my group seems to have gotten him to accept it the next morning, but I really shouldn't cut it that close.)
I think I only dropped one other class, Political Science, after receiving one bad (well, a 76, which was still above the class average; the professor encouraged us to write in explanations instead of just choosing what seemed best on the multiple choice test if none of the choices were perfect, but he seems to have changed his mind about that when half the class did so for over 10% of the questions and he got tired of reading though those.) test grade, since I was taking a lot of classes that semester and thought it would give me time catching up in the rest. (I probably should have dropped the class I ended up failing instead. I felt like I left there knowing less that I did when I went in, but when I had a better professor for it the next semester it was an easy A.) I had a 99 test average when I retook it, but unfortunately I had horrible writer's block on the term paper and never turned it in, bringing my high A down to a C.
One bad thing about Ws is that they do count as attempted hours as far as paying for classes or having scholarships pay for classes goes. My withdrawals would have meant I'd have to pay for the last semester here, but I ended up barely loosing the GPA for it at the last checkpoint anyway so it seems I have to pay for the final year instead. (Maybe I should have taken a W in Statistics rather than get a D, or better yet maybe I just should have taken a section of the class where homework wasn't 30% of the grade or where the professor would actually curve. A roommate in the ISYE instead of MATH section got an A with less effort, no homework, and worse raw test grades that got me a D.)
