Today, I sat on the admissions council for the University lab sciences program to decide who would enter the program next year. In attendance, there was two executive students, three instructors (two on the admissions committee), the two program co-ordinators, the department head, the university registrar rep, a rep for the government healthcare services, and a Senate rep.

The decisions are made on a weighted rank score based on academic history (cumulative GPA on years with 15 credits or more) and scores on admission requirements (eg, letter of intent). 29 are admitted (at least one must be an aboriginal applicant), and those are generally an easy decision facilitated by their rank score.

Historically, a couple of them will decline as they have another iron in the academic fire, so 16 alternates are selected and those take more work. The order if the alternates is the important part of the meeting since that has a huge bearing on whether you will get in or not, and is decided based on the aforementioned rank score, as well as previous applications, the specific courses they have taken (and which ones they tanked that caused them to not make the top ~30 or so), their performance on the 6 main prerequisite courses for getting in, how long they have been in school, and trends in their grades.

So yep, that’s the final admission proccess.