Our admissions team has received many inquiries about the exact timing of our early consideration round. In Fall 2023, we introduced an early consideration deadline with the hope of completing our early consideration round a bit earlier. We are pleased to announce that our early consideration round admission offers will be communicated this week. We concluded our early consideration round about 10 days earlier than last year.
We are often asked why the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo is last to communicate admission offers to applicants. Our timing is closely aligned with the reporting of grades by Ontario secondary schools. In February, we receive first term final grades from schools that use a semester system and we receive midterm grades from schools that do not use a semester system. The exact timing is difficult to predict. The grades need to be reported by the high schools to OUAC, forwarded to our university for processing, and checked for errors. Our team only receives grades once most issues have been resolved.
We did receive most of the grades we needed on February 26th. This allowed us to do a trial run of our systems. However, at least one high school with a large number of applicants submitted incorrect grades for its students so we were advised to wait for a grade update. On March 4th, we received the grades we need for our early consideration round. On March 7th, we completed the assessment of all AIFs submitted by the January 15th deadline. This allowed us to proceed with assessing the applications that met our early consideration deadline. We completed our assessment of these applications on the morning of March 11th.
Offers to non-OSS students will appear on Quest this week. These offers often involve manually coding due to the complexity of the offer letters. Often, non-OSS students have more conditions that must be met. This may include providing official transcripts and test scores. For this reason, offers do not tend to appear all at once. We expect all early round admission offers to be indicated on Quest by the end of Friday, March 15th.
OSS offers are often coded in bulk. These offers all have similar conditions to be met. We expect these offers to be coded at one time during the middle of this week. Again, we expect all early consideration round admission offers to be indicated on Quest by the end of Friday, March 15th.
We always get asked how many offers we have given out. We are not allowed to disclose the exact number of offers. Our goal was to fill approximately 50% of our spaces in our programs by the conclusion of the early consideration round. For most engineering programs, we have met our goal.
The Road to Engineering 