As many of you know, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we changed how we consider courses from Winter Term 2 of the 2019-2020 school year (or equivalent term). As discussed on our website and in our previous blog post, courses taken in this semester will be counted towards the minimum credit requirement for the program, but will not be incorporated in any grade point average calculations. Please see Evaluation Criteria: Academic Evaluation on our website for more information about what this means.
However, many students have taken full year coursework from 2019-2020, and only have a grade listed in Winter Term 2. While we would prefer students have their institutions list a grade for the course in Term 1 on their transcript, it has come to our attention that many programs and institutions do not have a means to do so. In order to not penalize these students by removing all grades from their full year courses in the calculation of their GPA, we will, if listed, consider their final course mark in the calculation of their GPA for the appropriate number of Term 1 (or equivalent term) credits.
What does this mean?
- If you took a 6-credit full year course, and received an 85% for the full course, we will include 3 credits at an 85% average in the calculation of your Overall GPA and Adjusted GPA. The other three credits will be considered to meet the minimum eligibility requirement, but will not be incorporated in the GPA calculations.
- If you took one full year course of 24 credits and received an 85% average for the course, we will include 12 credits at an 85% average in the calculation of your Overall GPA and Adjusted GPA. The other 12 credits will be considered to meet the minimum eligibility requirement, but will not be incorporated in the GPA calculations.
Why are we doing this?
The intention of excluding Winter Term 2 grades from our GPA calculations is to not further penalize students who had a very disrupted semester. However, for students who took a significant number of full year courses, if their registrar’s office cannot list a grade for their course for the first term, they will have a significant number of credits and grades removed from their Overall GPA calculation. Which, in turn, affects how many credits and grades can be eliminated from their Adjusted GPA calculation. This inadvertently penalizes these students more than students who did not take full year courses. Taking their final course grade and applying it to the credits they would have received for the first term puts these students on equal footing, in terms of credits with grades, with students who took only semester-long courses in 2019-2020.
Need clarification? Imagine these scenarios:
Applicant A took 30 credits in the 2019-2020 school year. They took 15 credits with grades in their first semester and 15 credits with grades in their second semester. All courses were one-semester courses. Therefore, their transcript lists grades for the 15 credits from 1st semester and the 15 credits from 2nd semester. Because they have 120 credits with grades when they apply, when we remove the 15 credits from Winter Term 2 in the calculation of their Overall GPA, they are eligible to have 15 credits from their worst year removed (120- 15 (Winter Term 2)- 15 (lowest graded credits from worst year) = 90 credits remaining).
Applicant B took 30 credits in the 2019-2020 school year. They took 15 credits in their first semester and 15 credits in their second semester. However, all of these courses were full year courses. Therefore, their transcript only lists grades for all 30 credits in the second semester. Because they have 120 credits with grades when they apply, when we remove all 30 credits from Winter Term 2 in the calculation of their Overall GPA, they are no longer eligible to have any credits removed from their worst year. (120-30 (Winter Term 2) = 90 credits remaining).
- This shift to including 15 of the credits from their full year course in the calculation of their Overall GPA will now make this person eligible to have 15 credits removed from the calculation of their Adjusted GPA.