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Ottawa now considering course/degree difficulty???


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Has this always been the case??

 

"Furthermore, in selecting students, the Admissions Committee reserves the right to assess, in the applicant's program, the level of difficulty of completed courses and their relevance to future medical studies at the University of Ottawa; the Committee also considers the candidate’s results in these courses."

Taken from https://med.uottawa.ca/undergraduate/admissions/application-process/eligibility-requirements Inthe last paragraph under "eligibility criteria"

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1 hour ago, EnchantedPrincess282 said:

Has this always been the case??

 

"Furthermore, in selecting students, the Admissions Committee reserves the right to assess, in the applicant's program, the level of difficulty of completed courses and their relevance to future medical studies at the University of Ottawa; the Committee also considers the candidate’s results in these courses."

 

Taken from https://med.uottawa.ca/undergraduate/admissions/application-process/eligibility-requirements Inthe last paragraph under "eligibility criteria"

 

This has always been there as far as I know. They don't give out specific preferences or scaling like French schools do, but it's a bad look if you're taking largely 1st and 2ndbyear courses in your 4th year to boost your GPA, or if you take all "bird courses" for your entire degree and end up with a 4.0

They simply want to make sure that you've challenged yourself enough to prepare for med school. So as long as you don't do something like mentioned above, you'd be fine. 

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24 minutes ago, HoopDreamssss said:

How would they determine which courses are "bird courses" or not? I don't see how they will assess every single course and determine its "difficulty" or am I being naive?

As mentioned, it’s a terrible look to take a bunch of 1st or 2nd year electives when you are in your 3rd or 4th year. Another way would be to compare your grade to the average of the class. On UOttawa transcripts, it shows the average of every single one of the classes you have ever taken next to the grade you obtained. They could easily use this to judge how difficult the course was. An A+ obtained when the average is an A is not equivalent to an A+ obtained when the average is a C. They could also look at your course load vs your ABS to see if you were 100% focused on school, or if you had other commitments. They could also give “more weight” to professional degrees. Honestly who knows but I think these are all fair-ish ways to asses difficulty.

Also wanted to point out that some other medical schools explicitly put weight on this, such as McGill and U of C.

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I remember seeing that before too and honestly that can’t be used competitively. It would probably be for red flags and not like it boosts ur score in some way cause it’s just way too much effort to design some adjustment algorithm for each school and each course. And they would also just not have that info, it changes year to year, with each professor, etc. Like others are saying if you take too many lower year courses it could stick out and if you just meet cutoffs you might not get a file review if I had to guess. In addition to the above poster, Westerns transcripts also show you the class average so I imagine that’s the norm with official transcripts at other institutions.

Your best bet is to follow Westerns guidelines and take at least 3.0/5.0 of upper year courses from year 3 onward and the rest easier electives would be fine.

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4 hours ago, HoopDreamssss said:

How would they determine which courses are "bird courses" or not? I don't see how they will assess every single course and determine its "difficulty" or am I being naive?

Class avaerges (if published on the transcript) might be one way. 

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