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The 5P university admissions strategy – Performance

After university admissions counselors examine your program, they will analyze your performance in that program.

Performance for traditionally-schooled students is measured in grades. In US high schools, it’s not uncommon for different courses to be weighted differently when calculating an overall GPA. This could mean that a high mark in phys-ed doesn’t count as much towards your average as a high mark in physics, or that a grade in an AP Physics class can raise your GPA more than a grade in a regular physics class.

Greene reveals for these US parents that no matter what adjustments your high school has made to the GPA, colleges are free to “undo” these transformations, or to change the weighting structure. A university may, for example, decide to give more weight to senior (Grade 12) courses, or ignore freshman (Grade 9) courses entirely in order to provide a more recent picture of the applicant.

While this is not generally an issue in Ontario universities, out-of-province institutes that do not follow the Top Six model (e.g. McGill University in Montreal) can and do employ these practices during admission.

A home schooled applicant to an Ontario university is not likely to be to be subject to these mysterious policies because:

1. any student applying as a Top Six student will have six (or more) 12U grades to submit to the universities. In Ontario, your 12U average is not a weighted average; every course will count equally in the calculation of your university admission average.
2. any student applying without six 12U courses may present grades from non-Ontario-accredited courses, but because they’re not the official 12U credits, the grades will not be treated with the same reverence as 12U grades would be. Instead, they will be used more “holistically” (and in all likelihood taken with a grain of salt or a dash of mistrust) to form an overall picture of the applicant. Therefore, the actual grade itself (83% vs 87%) is not nearly as meaningful in university admissions. Schools may not even bother to calculate a university admissions average if the grades they receive are not accredited Ontario high school courses from a recognized institution.
3. Many homeschoolers will apply to university without any “grades” — only standardized test scores.

So, should grades matter at all to home schoolers applying to university in Ontario?

It depends on the individual universities to which you apply as well as the route to university you choose to take. If your school has a standardized test only option, and you wish to simply take standardized tests as objective measures of your achievement, then the work you do throughout your high school years need not be rigorously graded and evaluated (except to further your own knowledge).

Even if a university does request a parent-issued diploma, it will not be accepted at face value, and it will not serve as an “equivalent” to an Ontario issued high school diploma. It will, however, be used to ensure that your home school high schooling was planned and thought out or that it, in retrospect, provided a solid educational foundation that was adequate preparation for university-level study.

Some schools may request a transcript, including grades, as a matter of paperwork, but will still use the standardized test scores heavily in the admission process. Certainly, if a university receives a “mommy diploma” with A’s and very high test scores, they are less likely to question the validity of the parent-issued documents. In the event that mommy is a tough marker, yet standardized test performance excels, you’ve given the university the impression that grades were not taken lightly throughout your home education. And likely, the test scores can be attributed in part to the educational standards that were set in the home.

It is of course the opposite situation that you may have to explain: high grades on a parent-issued transcript but low standardized test scores. This is why the 3rd P, preparation, is the key to any university application.

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