The Surge of A+ Students

In 2022, Robert Davis started high school at STEM Innovation Academy, a charter high school in Calgary. While there, he developed a fascination with cars and set his sights on becoming an engineer. Between his 90 per cent average and his status as a high-level rower, he figured he had a decent shot at getting into a good program somewhere in Canada. Just in case, he took a for-credit, study-abroad course with a private school, a common strategy among his peers for getting a strong English mark. 

In Grade 12, Davis applied to eight engineering programs across the country, including the University of British Columbia, the University of Calgary, the University of Alberta and the University of Victoria. His hope was to head west to UBC but, when he heard back from the school that winter, he’d been waitlisted. The verdict was the same everywhere else he’d applied. By the late spring of 2025, those waitlist notices had become rejections. When he graduated, he had no choice but to take a gap year. 

Not long ago, Davis’s high average would have guaranteed university admission. But high school grades have been on the rise, and now the proportion of students scoring in the 90s is higher than ever, raising the bar for entry incredibly high. At the same time, university instructors and administrators are noticing something bewildering. The incoming class is somehow, simultaneously, increasingly underprepared for university.

To understand how much grades have risen in Canadian high schools, you have to take the long view. Back in 2000, the Maclean’s University Guide reported the average grades of students entering undergrad programs in Canada as mostly in the high 70s and low 80s, while a handful of schools had average entering grades in the mid- to high 80s. In the years since, those numbers have inched up to the mid-80s and low 90s. In 2023, not a single school’s average entering grade was below 80 per cent. The University of Manitoba had the highest average entering grade, at an eye watering 92.5 per cent. Provincial-level data tell a similar story. Numbers compiled by the Council of Ontario Universities show that, between 2011 and 2021, the entering averages of first-year university students rose from 82 per cent to 88 per cent. 

For decades, grade inflation was slow and steady—a background hum. But the shift to online learning in 2020 jump-started a significant spike. That year, at the University of Manitoba, the number of first-years entering with 95 to 100 per cent averages shot up by 10 per cent. That figure crept upward for the next few years, peaking in 2022 before dipping back to 2020 levels in 2024.

Teasing out why grades are going up is challenging. It’s possible that students’ abilities have improved—that they’re smarter, more capable or working harder.

Immigration policy could also be playing a role. From 2016 to 2024, Canada welcomed substantially higher numbers of immigrants than it had earlier in the century. Research shows that the children of immigrants demonstrate higher educational achievement than those with Canadian-born parents.

There’s also been a culture shift in the way students are assessed. Several high school teachers I spoke to said they thought instructional methods weren’t as rigorous as they once were: these days, teachers are more likely to allow cheat sheets, permit students to retake tests and offer open-book exams. (Teachers leaned on the latter more heavily during the pandemic, when traditional closed-book and proctored examinations were out of the question.)

Some assessment changes go beyond teacher goodwill—they’re provincial policy. Since September of 2023, B.C. no longer allows student behaviour—like tardiness or homework completion—to affect marks. That means teachers can’t, for example, allot 10 per cent of a term grade for attendance or five per cent for turning work in on time. Manitoba has a similar policy. “When we were in high school, you got three lates and that turned into an absence. At 10 absences, you got booted out and had to beg to get back in,” one teacher in Winnipeg told me.  

Whatever the cause, grade inflation wouldn’t matter so much if the sky were the limit. But in a system that caps out at 100 per cent, an overabundance of 90s isn’t just inflation. It’s compression. 

More and more, students are applying to university with a 100 per cent average, and below that, decimal points matter. There’s frustratingly little distinguishing one applicant from another in the top five per cent. What is the difference between a 99.5 and a 99.6 per cent student, really? Between a 95 and a 97?

Western University’s Ivey School of Business offers one of the country’s most prestigious undergraduate business degrees. John-Derek Clarke, Ivey’s executive director of recruitment and admissions, has noted an increase in applications to its honours business administration program in the past few years, with a growing cluster of grades in the 92 to 95 range. He calls it a pandemic bump that hasn’t deflated. “Kids who, six years ago, would have graduated with a 95 are still getting the 95,” he says. “It’s the kids that might have been around 89 or the low 90s who are now getting a 95 as well.”

When grades are that tight, it’s difficult to rank applicants on a numerical basis. So Ivey’s admissions team places significant weight on supplementary information, with particular interest in what an applicant has done outside the classroom, such as extracurriculars, volunteering and entrepreneurial endeavours. Dwayne Benjamin, who leads strategic enrolment management at the University of Toronto, says applicants’ averages for their computer science program were consistently in the mid- to high 90s, so the department introduced supplementary materials into the application process in 2020. Now, prospective computer science students are asked to reflect on their personal experiences and qualities in four short-answer questions, which the school evaluates alongside their prerequisites and grades.

Part of the trouble for university admissions offices is that grade inflation doesn’t keep pace everywhere—a student who gets a 95 at one school could have the same abilities as a student who received an 85 at another. To combat this, the University of Waterloo’s engineering department uses a formula to adjust incoming averages based on how well students coming from the same province, country—and sometimes even the same high school—have historically performed once at university. In 2022, the most recent year for which public data is available, students who applied from Ancaster High School in Hamilton, Ontario, for example, had their admissions averages adjusted down by 21.4 points, meaning that a 95 per cent average would be discounted to a 73.6. Stephen Lewis Secondary School in Mississauga was assigned a more modest 8.1 point decrease. But Waterloo’s engineering department is an outlier. Ivey doesn’t adjust grades based on high school. Neither do the admissions offices at some of the country’s other most sought-after institutions—the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto or Queen’s University’s popular health science program. 

If more and more students are getting top grades, it’s reasonable to expect the knowledge and study habits that propelled them there would carry over into their university years. Instead, every fall, lecture halls are filling up with underprepared first-years. A University of California San Diego report from last November showed that one in 12 UCSD first-years didn’t meet middle-school math standards.

John Hannah has worked in academic support at various Canadian universities for 20 years. Since 2020, he’s directed U of T’s Centre for Learning Strategy Support, where a network of learning strategists help students develop their study skills and overall approach to learning. He says that while a grade can indicate how well a student is learning compared to their peers, high school grades aren’t signalling that as faithfully as they used to. That hasn’t stopped students from pinning their self-esteem to the state of their transcripts, though. The centre sees a surge of students seeking support every October after the first round of fall grades is released. Increasingly, Hannah says, they are less interested in finding better ways to learn and more fixated on optimizing their grades. “Students, very understandably, regard grades as the primary currency of their education,” he says, “and it’s a currency that is losing its value when viewed in this way.”

When the value of a grade erodes, there are real consequences. Students land at university with an inflated sense of their own ability. They might not seek academic assistance early enough, or at all. And they might find themselves completely disoriented by a dramatic drop in grades—which can give way to impostor syndrome. That’s what happened to Mashiyat Ahmed. At her Mississauga high school, she had a 95 per cent average and won the award for the highest grade in English. But when she entered her first year at U of T, her grades plunged into the 60s. “I was terrified. I didn’t know how to see myself anymore,” she says. 

Ahmed believes that when students receive high marks more easily, they’re more likely to view their grades as a reflection of their worth. Once Ahmed couldn’t rely on her GPA to feel good about herself, she had to find a way to cope. She directed more attention to work opportunities and extracurriculars, building out her portfolio and getting to know her professors. Broadening her focus helped. Eventually, getting a bad grade didn’t stir up as much self-doubt, but it took time. “I’m in my fourth year, and I’m only starting to see myself as smart again,” she says.

Darja Barr has been teaching mathematics at the University of Manitoba since 2007. Even then, she said, students would enter her first-year calculus course feeling quite confident—then they’d fail their first test. Recently, she says the problem has grown. She’s noticed a gaping disconnect between how students are evaluated in high school and what’s expected of them in university. To make matters worse, she points out, university class sizes are larger than ever before, meaning everyone receives less individual support.

Grade inflation, and the mounting pressure to compete for a spot at university, could be one of the factors to blame for student underpreparedness. When high school students net higher grades than they’ve earned, they’ve likely missed out on meaningful feedback, which Hannah considers the most important element of the learning experience. And research shows that obsessing over grades can both undermine deep learning and discourage educational risk-taking. One B.C. teacher I spoke to told me that if students want to prepare for university-level calculus, taking high school calculus is their best bet. But many of them shy away for fear their average will slip. “A lot of students are focused on ‘what can I do now to get into post-secondary?’ ” she says. “They’re concerned about the mark, not about what they’re learning.”

Robert Davis, the engineering hopeful from Calgary, spent last summer retaking calculus online, in between travelling to regattas and pulling nine-hour construction shifts as a skilled labourer at a school renovation site. He managed to raise his mark by eight per cent. Then came fall, and he filed another round of applications. He applied to 10 schools and added more backup options, including the engineering technology diploma at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, which offers the opportunity to transfer to the University of Calgary’s engineering department after two years. 

Davis has heard back from one school: a yes, from the University of Victoria. He’ll get his chance to go west after all. The news was a relief. His application to his dream school, UBC, still hangs in the balance. “As soon as they get back to me, I can make my decision,” he says. “I’m on my toes.”

This story appears in the 2026 edition of the Ultimate Guide to Canadian Universities. You can buy the issue for $19.99 here or on newsstands.