Everyone is always excited, concerned, interested and/or complaining about entrance averages, whether your a potential applicant, parent, faculty member, secondary school teacher, accreditation board, etc. So let’s have a look at how Ontario engineering school entrance averages have faired over the past few years. As usual, the data is from CUDO and in this case it is only available up to the 2021 entrance.

Here we have the overall entrance averages to all the engineering programs at various Ontario universities. If I understand CUDO correctly, these averages only include students coming from Ontario curriculum schools that report grades through OUAC. Therefore, they won’t include students from other provinces or countries.

As usual, Toronto, Waterloo and Queen’s have the highest averages, although McMaster is catching up in the most recent year or two.

In fact, most of the universities have an upward jump for 2021 and some for 2020. Why is that?

If I had to guess, it might be a grade inflation effect from the pandemic. It will be very interesting to see if this inflation is reversed in the 2022 and onward years as secondary schools returned to “normal”. I have some further data to use to drill down on what’s happening with these averages, and I’ll post this in the coming days.