Canada’s University Admissions Process Is Burning Students Out

Three years ago, when I was in Grade 12, I applied to 17 programs at nine Canadian universities. They covered a range of possible career paths: engineering, commerce, biomedical sciences. Even filmmaking. My grades were strong and my family, friends and teachers all assumed I’d get into every program I wanted. So did I. One of my top choices was bioengineering at McGill, where both my parents had studied. But when I logged onto the McGill portal and the admission decision finally loaded, I blanked. The words “We regret to inform you” flashed on the screen, and I felt a bizarre mix of anger and emptiness, like my stomach had fallen out but my brain was still trying to calculate what could have made the difference. Was it a single math test mark that brought me down? A decimal place on a graded assignment? Months of work perfecting presentations and practising calculus problems until midnight undone by an average that was just slightly too low. 

Grades are the key metric for determining who gets into a university program in Canada, and many high schools feel pressure to award higher grades to keep students competitive for top programs like Waterloo engineering, McGill engineering, McMaster health sciences and Queen’s commerce, where students are often expected to have grade averages in the high 80s or 90s just to be considered. This creates a loop where schools raise averages, universities raise cutoffs, and students feel even more pressure.

One afternoon in Grade 12, I watched a friend walk out of our teacher’s classroom, clutching her test and her eyes red from crying. She’d broken down mid-sentence, begging the teacher for a few extra marks on a calculus quiz because she needed them for her application to the nursing program at McMaster. Students joked about the “crying student strategy” as if it were a harmless life hack. But underneath it was the truth that our grades didn’t always measure our academic ability. And because pleading (or crying) could change a grade, marks also became a measure of who could negotiate best, not who understood the material. A 95 at one school could be a freebie; at another, it demanded weeks of studying.

In an attempt to combat this grade inflation and inequity, universities have added assessments like Waterloo’s admissions information form, UBC’s personal profile, and similar supplements at Western and the University of Toronto. They’re meant to create a fuller picture of a student, but the ultra-competitive reality of admissions today, where almost 8,000 kids are applying for 240 spots at McMaster Health Sciences, creates new biases. Every time I open Instagram, I see ads from consultants promising to “craft the perfect application,” glossy carousels claiming they can turn a 16-year-old into a brand for only a few thousand dollars in return. There’s an entire industry built on polishing teenagers into something admissions-friendly, and it only widens the gap for those who can’t afford to pay. Students with time, money and access can curate polished activity lists, while those working part-time or helping their families can’t compete. 

In addition to wealth-inequity flaws, the structure of many supplementals reinforces a high-performance and high-volume mindset. To students, it feels as though it isn’t enough to simply join a club, you’re expected to start one. While only a few people I knew in real life were starting biomedical companies or mental-health nonprofits, online it felt like everyone was. My feed was full of teenagers who were “founders” and students publishing research at 16. By Grade 11, I had stopped carrying my sketchbook because drawing for pleasure felt indulgent. 

Today, I’m a third-year mechanical engineering student at Queen’s University, and I’m genuinely happy with where I ended up. But if what I saw this fall when I volunteered representing Queen’s Smith Engineering at the Ontario Universities’ Fair is any evidence, this year’s students have the same mindset I had. Almost every question I heard from prospective students collapsed into a single theme: What average do I need? Not what the program teaches. Not what their career might look like. Just the number. Parents hovered beside them, juggling dozens of information booklets and discussing grade cutoffs.

I could see my own Grade 12 self in every conversation: optimizing, strategizing, terrified of slipping a single percentage point. I still think about what a guidance counsellor told me in Grade 9: joining student council would “look great on a university application.” For years, that logic shaped every decision I made, what courses I took, what clubs I joined, and how I defined success. Many students I’ve talked to recently feel they can’t explore what they love if it risks a lower grade or a missing extracurricular entry on an application.

In my first year at Queen’s, I observed classmates comparing their high school averages, almost all in the mid-to-high 90s. But when the first calculus midterm came around, the differences between students were staggering. Some breezed through; others, just as “qualified” on paper, were completely unprepared and failed brutally. Seeing the effects of such an uneven skillset stayed with me.

Since then, I’ve analyzed this system from the inside, speaking with professors who review applications and mentoring high school students through Queen’s clubs. I’ve also returned to my own high school to lead career workshops and represented Queen’s at recruitment events where I’ve met hundreds of applicants, parents and educators. Through these experiences, I’ve seen how inconsistent grading and inequitable access shape students and their experiences; grades without standardization miss context, and supplemental applications reward privilege. But I think this can be improved by rethinking two key things: how grades are evaluated and how we define extracurricular success. 

When every province, every school, even every classroom plays by its own grading rules, an invisible lottery decides who gets opportunities and who doesn’t. In a country this large, it’s impossible to compare students fairly without a shared standard. Other countries have already been working on this; the question is what a system like that could look like in Canada. For example, the country’s education departments could build a collective context-based grading reference using data that already exists, like Ontario’s EQAO, Alberta’s diploma exams and historical school grading trends, to help universities interpret what a 95 actually represents.

Standardization would also realign incentives for the high schools distributing these grades. If inflated marks no longer offered an advantage, schools would have less incentive to hand them out and more reason to focus on real learning. Universities, in turn, could make decisions that reflect a student’s potential, not just their postal code or the leniency of their teacher.

Meanwhile, supplemental applications, which can reveal who a student really is, could be designed more fairly, for example by capping entries at two or three extracurriculars, encouraging students to focus on what truly matters to them instead of feeling the need to join 10 clubs just to impress. The people I admire most at university aren’t the ones sprinting between clubs; they’re the ones who go all-in on what they love. One friend spent years building a biomechatronics team on campus to design an exoskeleton. Another has been training for months to break an Ironman world record. A third is climbing mountains in Nepal for four months simply because she loves the challenge. To me, these are the students who will create real change: they will build things, test ideas, push their bodies and minds and stay committed long after the novelty of a project wears off.

For me, once the pressure of “getting in” was behind me, I had the space to slow down and think about what I actually wanted to learn and who I wanted to become. Without constantly chasing grades or resumé lines, I had time to meet people who cared about the same things I did. I was able to rediscover the joy of learning; sitting on the floor of the engineering lounge at midnight, working on a prosthetic arm prototype and laughing with friends. It was only after stepping outside the admissions pressure-cooker mindset that I began to understand my own definition of success: the kind of work I enjoy, the environment I thrive in and the people I want to partner with. I wish students had the chance to make those types of discoveries earlier, before the admissions process rushes them to decide what to study, polishing applications for programs they’re not even sure they want. I wish young students felt the freedom to chase the things that make them feel curious, challenged and alive.