How Ontario Universities Calculate Your Top 6 Admission Average

The base rule: best 6, U or M level only

Ontario universities build your admission average from your 6 best Grade 12 University (U) or University/College (M) courses. According to University of Waterloo's admissions guidance , College (C), Open (O) and co-op courses are excluded entirely from this calculation, regardless of the mark you earned in them.

If you take 8 U/M courses in Grade 12, only 6 of them feed into your average. The question is which 6.

Required courses go in first, no matter the mark

Your program's listed prerequisites are not optional inputs you can swap out for a better mark elsewhere. Waterloo's guidance is explicit here: your admission average is the average of your top 6 Grade 12 courses including the courses required for the program you are applying to. If a program requires English, Biology, Chemistry and Advanced Functions, those four marks are locked into your average even if one of them is your weakest grade of the year.

Once the required courses are placed, the university fills the remaining slots with your next-highest U or M marks from any other subject.

A worked example

Waterloo publishes a worked example that shows the mechanism clearly: an applicant took 8 Grade 12 courses, 4 of which were required for their program (English, Biology, Chemistry, Advanced Functions). Those 4 required marks were automatically included in the average. The university then added the applicant's 2 highest-scoring electives from the remaining 4 courses to reach 6 total, producing a final average of 82.2%.

Notice what did not happen: the applicant's 2 weakest non-required courses were dropped, and a strong elective could not bump a required course out of the calculation even if the elective's mark was higher.

Why this trips students up

• Students sometimes assume dropping a hard required course and adding an easier elective will raise their average. It will not, since the required course stays in regardless.

• A high mark in a College-stream or Open course never helps, even if the subject matches your intended major.

• Taking extra U/M electives beyond 6 gives you no benefit unless one of them beats an existing non-required course already in your top 6.

• Weak marks in required prerequisites cannot be diluted by a large course load elsewhere. Focus effort on required courses first.

Policies can differ by school

The mechanism above, locking in required courses and filling the rest with your best remaining marks, is the common approach across Ontario university admissions. Individual schools can still apply their own wrinkles: how they round, whether a specific program treats a prerequisite as pass/fail rather than average-affecting, or how they handle repeated courses. Before you finalize your course selection, check the admission average page for each university and program you are targeting, since the exact policy affects which courses are worth prioritizing.

What to do with this

• List your program's required Grade 12 courses first, then treat every mark in those courses as locked into your average.

• Put your strongest effort into required courses rather than spreading it evenly across every U/M course you take.

• Choose your non-required electives based on where you are most likely to score highest, since only your top marks among them count.

• Confirm the exact calculation method on your target school's own admissions page before assuming every Ontario university works identically.