What is an admission average?

At Waterloo, your admission average will be the average of your top six Grade 12 courses (U or M courses for Ontario students) including the courses which are required for the program you're applying to.

  • If you take more than six Grade 12 courses, we'll use the courses required for admission to your program of interest plus your other courses with the highest grades.
  • For Ontario students, C (college), O (open), and co-op courses are not included in your admission average for Waterloo.

How do we calculate an admission average?

Let's say you apply to a program that requires English, Biology, Chemistry, and Advanced Functions. You've chosen to take eight Grade 12 courses with the following final or mid-term marks.

  • English (82%)
  • Music (86%)
  • International Business Fundamentals (81%)
  • Biology (84%)
  • Advanced Functions (78%)
  • Calculus and Vectors (75%)
  • Chemistry (80%)
  • World Issues: A Geographic Analysis (83%)

Your admission average would be 82.2%. To get this, we take 82 + 84 + 80 + 78 from the four required courses, add 86 (Music) + 83 (World Issues) to get a total of six courses, and then divide by six. If you don't have final grades in some of your courses, we'll use mid-term or predicted grades.

Waterloo's admission requirements →

How accurate are the admission averages?

  • They're based on the grades of students we admitted last year.
  • They're pretty accurate. We don't intentionally make them higher or lower than what we expect them to be.