Tag: education

Final Round Admissions Update

William Bishop3 Comments

Spring is in full bloom as demonstrated by my flowering pear tree so it is time to provide a final round admissions update. This will be my last scheduled blog post until all admission decisions have been communicated to applicants.

We have started to receive midterm grade data from the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre (OUAC) for Ontario Secondary Schools. Once we receive all the data we need, we will proceed with the final round of admission for the Faculty of Engineering. Our team will assess applicants over the next week with all offers being communicated prior to May 17th. During our final round, we will not be able to respond to individual inquiries regarding applications. Please be patient with our admissions team. We realize this is a highly stressful time for applicants, families, guidance counsellors, teachers, and school administrators.

Most, but not all, offers to Ontario Secondary School students will be communicated at one time. There are always a few offers that involve a bit more processing so these take longer. Offers to Non-Ontario Secondary School students often roll out in small batches. These offers have more complicated conditions that involve some manual processing. Our awards office will also be awarding entrance scholarships to selected applicants. All admitted applicants including those who have already received an offer of admission are eligible for these entrance scholarships in our final round. We must communicate all decisions by May 17th. All applicants will know whether they have been admitted and whether they have been offered a scholarship by May 17th.

New this year, some applicants to Civil Engineering will receive an email inviting them to request an admission offer to either Environmental Engineering or Geological Engineering. The Civil Engineering applicant pool is deeper than in previous admission cycles. We also anticipate that we will have available spaces in Environmental Engineering and Geological Engineering at the conclusion of our final round. We hope to fill these available spaces with students who might be interested in considering an alternate offer to Environmental Engineering or Geological Engineering. These programs share many courses with Civil Engineering and often lead to similar career paths. A special email will be sent to qualified applicants who have not been selected for an admission offer to Civil Engineering. This email will invite them to request an alternate offer to either Environmental Engineering or Geological Engineering. These individuals will have a short window of time to respond to the email. Otherwise, they will be denied admission to the University of Waterloo when the final round concludes on May 17th.

The reason for the short time window is related to ensuring that all admission offers can be made at least two weeks prior to the deadline to accept an offer. This also allows time for applicants to apply for residence while the residence guarantee is still valid. We considered giving out offers automatically to one of the two programs, but we felt it would be better to provide this select group of applicants with a choice of program. While both programs are similar to Civil Engineering, there are some key differences. Individuals will be given the opportunity to reach out to our faculty to find out more about these programs before making a decision. Agreeing to receive an offer does not require a firm commitment to accept an offer. Applicants will still have at least two weeks to decide whether they wish to accept the alternate offer. For those who are not currently applicants to Waterloo Engineering, I do not expect this opportunity to exist in future admission cycles. Our situation this year is unique and unexpected.

While we still have many offers to give out in the final round, I have no doubt that many strong applicants will unfortunately be denied admission to programs with highly competitive applicant pools. The reason is simply the competitiveness of our applicant pools. There will be students with high averages and strong extracurricular involvement that we are unable to admit. We have a limited number of spaces in our engineering programs. Hopefully, you will receive some good news next week.

Early Consideration Round

William Bishop26 Comments

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.