In Quebec, grades are normalized using a statistical formula that factors in how well students from your high school tend to perform in university[0]. This means an average student at an "elite" school could end up with a similar score to a top student from a weaker school.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_score

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morkalork 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Wow, interesting. Do students take that into account when selecting which CEGEP to attend?

I don't know how it is in Ontario now, but when I went through HS there university admissions were your top-K grades for the last couple of years and they didn't factor in which school you attended. There were no shortage of private/alternative high schools in Toronto that catered gaming that system with lax workloads and inflated grades.

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jjmarr 6 days ago | parent [-]

Most university have their own "adjustment factors" for competitive programs, to counteract this.

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morkalork 6 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure if universities knew the origin HS at the time because applications within the province were centralized in a single system, also because there was talk at one point of making the HS known which implies it wasn't?

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jjmarr 5 days ago | parent [-]

I don't know how it was when you were applying, but when I applied in 2018 the universities knew your HS and Waterloo was doing adjustments based on your high school.

Over the past 7 years other schools have done so as well. Waterloo's adjustment factor list got FOI'd and made public if you want to find yours.

	▲	morkalork 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ok! The one I can find only goes back to 2016 and I was applying a bit before that. The grid has a lot of missing data since Waterloo probably doesn't have enough data for each cohort and HS to make a good estimate, I guess that would make a province-wide system like in Québec superior since they can adjust based on outcomes from all universities. After seeing the list I'm kind of sad, I had the choice between two schools at 10 and 13, and chose the one with 13. A 3% difference can make or break an application in any competitive program... Well, at least it wasn't one of those schools with 20 point factor, wow.

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tptacek 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Selective universities in the US all do the same thing with high school grades.