In a recent couple of posts we’ve looked at the overall entrance averages for some Ontario engineering programs, and the specific proportion of admitted students that had a 95%+ average. Let’s look at the full breakdown of the proportions of admitted students with averages of 75-79, 80-84, etc. This data gets a bit too messy to plot across several years, so I’ll just look at 2021, the most recent year available on the CUDO data website.

As seen in the previous post, Toronto and Waterloo have significant proportions with a 95+ average, with most of the rest in the 90-94% range. It’s hard to see, but there are a few in the 85-89 range for Toronto (0.7%) and Waterloo (3.2%).

The other universities have somewhat different distributions of entrance averages, depending on how competitive it is for the limited number of spaces at each. Queen’s and Western look similar, while McMaster is a bit more competitive. Carleton, Ottawa, Guelph and TMU (Toronto Metropolitan University) all have similar distributions, and then the others. There are a few places where students might get admitted with a Grade 12 average of less than 80%, but it’s still a pretty small proportion. I got admitted to Waterloo with an 83% average (if I recall correctly), but then again that was in a different century 🙂

We saw in the previous post that the entrance averages have been rising lately, so the distributions are also likely changing. However, I doubt that the relative comparisons between universities have changed much in the past few years. Maybe something to look into in the future?