As a student, you want to be successful at university and earn your degree. As universities, we also want students to succeed and go on to meaningful personal and professional lives after graduation.
To ensure students are academically well prepared to succeed, universities have specific requirements that need to be met as part of the application process. These “admission requirements” can include
Admission requirements vary greatly between universities and types of programs. Depending on the type of the program, requirements can range from one Grade 12 English course to Grade 12 English, Chemistry, Physics, and two math courses.
A big part of understanding admission requirements is learning about the terminology universities use.
Each university program will have a specific set of high school courses (or equivalents) you need to complete to be considered for admission. Some universities (such as Waterloo) may require a minimum final grade in some or all of the required courses to ensure you’re well prepared.
Some requirements are quite broad while others are very specific. If you’re applying from outside Ontario, we’ll require the courses that are equivalent to the Ontario courses listed here.
Any Grade 12 U English*
* = minimum final grade of 70% required; ** = minimum final grade of 75% required. Be sure to check our admission requirements for the most current and complete requirements.
Your admission average will play a big role in determining whether you’re admitted to the programs you applied to.
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.
Ontario C (college), O (open), and co-op courses are not included in your admission average for Waterloo.
If you’re not an Ontario high school student, the number of courses in your admission average will depend on your educational system.
You can review the admission requirements for your province, country, or system for specific details.
Let’s say you apply to a program that requires English, Biology, Chemistry, and a math course. You’ve chosen to take eight Grade 12 courses with the following final or mid-term marks.
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 (Dramatic Arts) 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.
At Waterloo, your admission average will be the average of your top 6 Grade 12 courses or equivalents including the courses which are required for the program you’re applying to.
To give you an idea of the grades you might need to be considered, universities will provide ranges such as mid-80s, 80-84%, or low 90s. This means that most students admitted the previous year had admission averages in that range or higher.
The ranges, which depend on the number of spaces available in a program, the number of students who apply, and their qualifications, vary by program and from year to year.
Some programs list “recommended” courses along with the courses that are required for admission.
These recommended courses are not required for admission and whether you take them or not will not affect your application. However, they will be helpful background for understanding some of the material in your first-year courses.
Many universities will ask you to complete a supplemental form or written statement about yourself once you’ve applied. At Waterloo, we use the Admission Information Form (AIF) in place of personal statements or essays that other universities may require. The AIF helps us learn about your interests, extracurriculars, goals, and more. The details you provide can help universities when they make admission and scholarship decisions.
For programs where the number of students applying greatly outnumbers the spaces available, universities need ways to distinguish between many students who have similar averages.
That’s where personal statements (such as Waterloo’s Admission Information Form), interviews, math or science contest results, and portfolios can be used by universities to learn about students’ academic and personal backgrounds.
If you apply to a highly competitive program at Waterloo and have opportunities (such as math or science contests) to make your application stand out, these will only enhance your application and will never work against you if you happen not to do well.
You may receive a notice that you didn’t meet the requirements and your application was refused.
Some schools (such as Waterloo) may provide an alternate offer of admission to a related program for which you meet the requirements and in which we think you’ll be successful.
Some universities post a minimum overall average for admission, and some universities post a range. In both cases, these are based on previous year’ applicant pool and may change.
When a range is posted (like at Waterloo), it gives students a guide to what averages successful applicants have had in the past.
It depends on the program and university. At Waterloo, for highly competitive programs, we want to compare students as fairly as possible and want to see as many Grade 12 marks as possible.
This means some programs wait for updated grades to arrive in late April and send acceptances in May.
It depends on the university and the program you’re applying to. At Waterloo, we have a policy regarding repeated and non-day school courses.
You’ll be considered a transfer student in this case. You need to have the high school courses required for your program of interest – or equivalent courses at college or university. You can search the admission requirements for transfer students.
You can search our admission requirements based on where you’re completing or have completed high school.
It’s up to you. You can take more than two if you wish. At Waterloo, we would use the two courses in which you have the highest grades.
Universities can make conditional offers of admission based on final grades for courses you’ve completed and mid-term/predicted grades for courses you’re currently taking.
Your Offer of Admission would then list conditions you need to meet by a certain date. Conditions are often minimum final grades you need to achieve in the courses required for the program you’ve been admitted to.
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The University of Waterloo acknowledges that much of our work takes place on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Our active work toward reconciliation takes place across our campuses through research, learning, teaching, and community building, and is co-ordinated within the Office of Indigenous Relations.
