Dear, People, have a Q

NamelesStatistic
Sun, 25 Aug 2013 13:38:18 +0000

@Catria:

“Quebec schools” are a pretty heterogeneous group. Some have a reputation for grade inflation (I have heard that grades are high at UQAM). McGill has a academic reputation to maintain and if it just gave away A grades (especially in its flagship science courses) this would hurt the reputation of its graduates at other institutions (ie. if McGill pumped out a huge number of graduating A students then a McGill degree with a good gpa would be looked with suspicion at other universities when former McGill undergrads were applying to grad school). As such the grading distribution is maintained at a fairly constant level. McGill is reputed to have a fair degree of negative grade curving, but not as bad as schools like Toronto.

Again the difficulty of getting an A is also very different between what major you take even at the same university (eg. religious studies vs engineering)

85% A’s (4.0 or in some cases 3.9) can be achieved at schools like UofToronto too which is infamous for its down-curving of grades. However 85+% are not given out very often and the course averages generally range from 67% (C+, 2.3) to (B-, 2.7). The percentage value to get an A at many Canadian universities may be lower, but you correspondingly see a lot fewer of those high percentages handed out. It is just a different method of marking.