As Ontario high school grades keep rising, graduating students worry about their university future

Maya Duckworth-Pilkington spent the first two weeks of January buried in her textbooks, studying. 

Until she submitted her final advanced functions exam, the Rosedale Heights School of the Arts senior didn’t realize how much time and effort she was putting into her studies.

“The pressure is higher than ever to do well,” she explained over text message. “People aren’t sleeping well, eating well or getting leisure time.”  

At the time of writing her exams, Duckworth-Pilkington said she had an average of 96 per cent. She’s a peer tutor, co-president of a leadership club, an editor for the school paper, and a production head for her school’s musical theatre program.

Despite that, she’s not sure if she’s going to get into the university program of her choice. 

Her experience is reflected in a trend that shows entry averages for Grade 12 students that got into university keep rising.  And they’ve been rising for 15 years, according to an analysis of data from the Council of Ontario Universities (COU) by CBC News. 

It’s a trend that goes back to 2006, with the latest COU data from 2021 showing that for most universities, typical entry averages for high school students sat between 85.4-92.9 per cent. A previous CBC News analysis going back to 2017 showed that entry averages sat between 82.2-90.4 per cent that year. 

The numbers paint a stark picture of what it’s like to be a graduating student in the province right now, as university admissions ramp up and education experts call for an overhaul of both the high school grading system and the university admissions process. 

It’s not just higher grades that are being given out to more students, according to Sachin Maharaj, an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa who teaches about grade inflation. 

Maharaj says grades in high schools tend to cluster at two different ends: around the cutoff grade for a passing mark, which is 50 per cent, and at the higher end, in the A+ range.

“There’s increased pressure on teachers to get students to pass their classes either by helping them learn more, or by artificially inflating their grades to get them above the cutoff mark so that they achieve the credit," said Maharaj. 

“All of the incentives in the system are for teachers to do that.”

On the other side of the grading spectrum, there’s an incentive for schools to give out high grades so they can report that their students are getting into prestigious programs, says Maharaj. 

“It's really this arms race that there's no way to climb down from,” Maharaj said. “If some people are doing it, you're just hurting yourself and your students if you don't also do it.”