At our recent Fall Open House I met several prospective applicants who are enrolled in the CEGEP system.  That’s a long trip for a few hours at an open house, but it was nice to meet them.

The Province of Québec has a somewhat unique junior college system that starts after Grade 11, called CEGEP.  We don’t get a whole lot of applicants from CEGEPs, but we certainly admit a few each year and they tend to do quite well in our engineering programs.

The posted admission requirements for CEGEP are:

Linear Algebra; 2 English 603 or 604 series; Calculus I (Calculus II recommended); Chemistry I and II; and Mechanics plus either Electricity & Magnetism; or Waves, Optics & Modern Physics, with a total of 12 academic courses.

It’s sometimes difficult for CEGEP students to complete all those courses in their first year (especially Linear Algebra), so many applicants come from the second year of CEGEP.  Since our programs are designed with to work with the Ontario high school curriculum, CEGEP applicants tend to be over-prepared (which is probably why they do so well), but that’s better than being under-prepared.

The good news is that our generic posted admission averages don’t really directly apply to CEGEP applicants.  Our adjustment factors for CEGEP will allow for applicants with average grades (for the required courses) in the low 80’s to have a decent chance at admission to most programs (but as usual, the higher the grades the better).  So CEGEP applicants should pay no attention to stuff they see online about needing 90s or 95s to get into Waterloo.