I may or may not know what I'm doing.
2020-04-19
Note: OUAC, chances of admission, adjustment factor, conditional offer.
This is part of a 3-part series on the University of Waterloo’s application process. In this series, I cover high school course grades, the admission information form (AIF), and the video interview. I will refer to the applicant as “you”.
Today’s topic will be on high school grades.
I attended high school in Ontario, so I will focus on the Undergrad (101) process. The Ontario Universities’ Application Centre (OUAC) is also where to submit the three (or more) applications to various university programs. UW only accepts one application to an engineering program, but you will also get a chance to choose a second choice in the AIF.
Ontario high schools will send grade 11 and first semester grade 12 grades to the OUAC. As second semester progresses, high schools will update the OUAC with second semester grade 12 midterm grades. Universities will take the first batch and/or the second batch to use for their admissions process.
Grade 11 grades are generally only useful for early admission. What’s more important is to maintain high grades in the first semester of grade 12 and in the first part of second semester, as those are what the universities will focus on. Even though my grades in grade 11 were not very good, I focused on my studies in grade 12 and managed to get accepted.
Dr. William Bishop is the Director of Admissions for the faculty of engineering at the University of Waterloo, and maintains a blog on engineering admissions, The Road to Engineering. In this blog, he writes about the admissions process, and gives useful insights on how the admissions team gives offers to applicants. There are nice graphs displaying the chance of admission given an average. Also check out Dr. William Anderson’s blog for information on previous years.
Grade inflation has become a problem in the past few years, and so there exists an adjustment factor, depending on the high school. On average, this adjustment factor is 16%. How this adjustment factor affects admissions, I have no clue. However, I can speculate that having a lower adjustment factor is better, although this is out of your control so you shouldn’t focus on it. I believe the faculty of mathematics does not include an adjustment factor in their admissions process.
A conditional offer of acceptance will be sent out to the lucky ~10% in May (or earlier, depending on the round). You will be expected to maintain your second semester grade 12 average above a certain threshold, typically 80% to 85%. Once this condition is met, you will be fully accepted into the program.
The important information to take away is to maintain high grade 12 grades in order to increase the chances of being accepted into the program of choice. However, grades are not the only factor in determining chances of being accepted. I will discuss the next topic in the next post.
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