Rising Ontario school grades are affecting university entry

Tyson Hamilton has a 96% average and was president of his high school student council, but the Grade 12 student did not get admitted into business degree programmes at the University of Toronto, Queen’s or McMaster, writes Mike Crawley for CBC News.

While Hamilton received offers from seven other university programmes and is excited about his choice to enrol in a dual degree programme at Western University this fall, he wonders why programmes would reject an A-plus student. “If a 96 isn’t good enough, what is?” said Hamilton in an interview. “Where does it stop? Is everyone going to be needing 100 averages to get into these programmes?”

His rejections are the result of a trend that reveals an increasingly larger number of students with high grades competing for Ontario’s most coveted post-secondary spots. The average Grade 12 marks of students enrolling in first-year programmes at Ontario universities have been rising steadily upward, according to data compiled by the Council of Ontario Universities.
Full report on the CBC News site