The previous post showed the overall averages of students admitted to engineering programs (based on CUDO and Ontario school data). Since CUDO provides the data broken down into grade range bins, let’s look at one in particular. This is the bin for admitted students with an admission average of 95% or higher. The graph below shows the proportion (%) of admitted engineering students that had a final admission average greater than or equal to 95%, from 2017 to 2021 (the last available year)

The graph shows some interesting features. First, as expected, the proportion of admitted students with 95%+ is higher at the universities that tend to be more competitive (i.e. Toronto, Waterloo, Queen’s and McMaster). “Competitive” just means that they get a lot of applicants for a limited number of spaces, so of course the entrance grades tend to be higher.

It’s interesting to note that McMaster has sort of overtaken Queen’s in terms of competition, at least according to this specific metric. We’ll look at other metrics in later posts some day.

Also notable is the apparent increase in proportions of 95%+ for all universities in 2021, and some in 2020. Possibly this is related to the pandemic impacts on grades in secondary schools, since we also saw this in the previous post on overall averages. When the 2022 and 2023 grade data eventually comes out we’ll see if this was a blip, or some systemic issue.

Finally, it’s somewhat shocking to see that over 80% of students admitted to Toronto engineering in 2021 had 95%+ averages. I’ll look at the other grade ranges later, but it’s kind of weird to contemplate that if you’re a new student in Toronto and your entrance average was 94% (excellent by any other measure), you’re in a minority group of less than 20% of the class. Waterloo is getting into a similar situation, but possibly the other factors considered in admissions (Admission Information Form, non-academic factors, interviews) are spreading the entrance grades downwards a bit more?