Authored by Cathy Newell Kelly, University registrar, this update was previously published in the Registrar's Office newsletter.
Teams within the Registrar’s Office, along with our campus partners, have been enthusiastically working toward updates to our undergraduate admissions processes and the technology that supports them. We will be launching our holistic admissions approach to applicant evaluation this fall, for our fall 2025 applicants. This means that we have re-imagined our Admissions Information Form (AIF), exchanging most previous questions with four new questions that elicit evidence of variables that have been demonstrated to predict student success, based on 40 years of research in the U.S. and Canada. Our new evaluation strategy will include measures to help mitigate against bias and support inclusion. AIF submissions, required for programs in Engineering and Mathematics, will be anonymized and scored by two readers, and a third reader if the first two scores are widely disparate.
From the applicant perspective, the technology and user interface will be unchanged for fall 2025 applications. We have made the difficult decision to defer implementation of the Slate platform until our fall 2026 admissions cycle. We have a fairly short window within which to implement a new system in admissions, and it became clear that we would not have a sufficient margin of safety for implementation this fall. The team, working with our implementation consultants, have addressed some unanticipated hurdles with the data received from the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre (OUAC) and we are now on track to improve data management via Slate when we launch. We will also have opportunity in the coming months to address several other improvements, such as for our contract applications, and to explore implementation of the CRM functionality.
Questions can be sent to André Jardin or Cathy Newell Kelly.