UoW has a really low requirement for entry, of my class many students went to study at UoW most of them had average to below average grade, compared to Oxbridge UoW has a joke of an entry requirement, I later learned they have a very high dropout rate after first year - which explains things, but I think is disingenuous to their students. School should be a place of learning not a lab for natural selection.
I like it much better this way. Proving you can handle university by actually handling it is better and more fair than having admissions guess based on proxies like extracurriculars, personal essays, and easily gamed high school grades.
It's also worth clarifying that while Waterloo has a low _hard_ cut off, it still tends to take academically qualified students. e.g. for engineering 2012, 66% of students had averages over 90% and the average ... average was 91% [1].
As for attrition, [2] states that 90.8% of first year students advance to second year, and 88.6% of admitted engineers complete a degree (but perhaps critically, not an engineering degree). There are a lot of valid criticisms of Waterloo, but I'm not sure that low admission standards and high attrition are among them.
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I like it much better this way. Proving you can handle university by actually handling it is better and more fair than having admissions guess based on proxies like extracurriculars, personal essays, and easily gamed high school grades.
Edit: grammar
It's also worth clarifying that while Waterloo has a low _hard_ cut off, it still tends to take academically qualified students. e.g. for engineering 2012, 66% of students had averages over 90% and the average ... average was 91% [1].
As for attrition, [2] states that 90.8% of first year students advance to second year, and 88.6% of admitted engineers complete a degree (but perhaps critically, not an engineering degree). There are a lot of valid criticisms of Waterloo, but I'm not sure that low admission standards and high attrition are among them.
[1]: https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/univers...
[2]: https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/univers...