The GPA: The Canadian Student's Nightmare

In my second semester, I've come to understand more fully how the grading systems work in Canadian universities. Arts and Sciences degrees at U of T take 4 years, with students mostly taking 5 modules in the two yearly semesters over 4 years to add up to the required 20 credits to graduate. (Summer school, essentially a third semester, exists but it carries additional fees). For each module completed, the student receives a percentage which can then be turned into a Grade Point Value (GPV). The Grade Point Average (GPA) is then the average of all the GPVs, and is the score that defines how well you did in your degree. The table below shows a rundown of the marks:

Percentage	Letter Grade	Grade Point Value
85-100 80-84 77-79 73-76 70-72	A/A+ A- B+ B B-	4.0 3.7 3.3 3.0 2.7
Pattern continues down until F which is a fail
0-49	F	0.0

Basically with the GPA, every module that you take will be one credit towards your 20 credits to graduate. That means that if you fail a module or don't do that well in it, the mark will essentially "haunt you forever" (I'm using a phrase one of my Canadian friends used when explaining the system to me) as even if you retake the module, the original mark will still be recorded and lower your GPA. There is a credit/no credit system that allows students to take 2 modules (in total) that count towards the 20 credit graduation but not the GPA, although the catch here is that the no credit module cannot be a module required for the major you are enrolled in.

Having spoken with my Canadian buddies, I think I've decided that I prefer the UK degree system. The Canadian students are so terrified of taking a module that lowers their GPA that many tend to pick "easy" modules that they are more confident they can do well in. For example, one Canadian started taking an economics module only to drop the module in the first 2 weeks because they'd encountered slightly unfamiliar statistics material. The Global Warming course I'm taking is quite difficult and from an enrollment of 208 we dropped significantly in numbers after the first set of test marks when many decided they'd already messed up chances for a good module percentage; many of the remaining people in the Facebook group for the course wish they'd dropped it in order to save their GPA. One of my friends in the Global Warming course always wanted to do the course but took it strategically in his fourth and final year once his graduate applications were sent off so that if the GPA did  go down it wouldn't matter as much.

This is the problem: sure, the credit/no credit system allows people the choice of 2 modules that interest them without impacting the GPA, but overall, there is far too much strategic thinking in which courses to take, with the result being that many Canadian students take modules that are "easy", rather than modules that genuinely interest them. In the case of the person who dropped the economics module because of unfamiliar statistics concepts, the fear of the GPA stunted the broadening of their academic knowledge of concepts that they were probably perfectly capable of understanding. In this sense I like that UCL takes the median score as it means you do tend to take modules you're interested in, knowing that if you do badly in a couple of modules, your overall degree classification won't be affected by these outlier marks.

Another point is that at U of T, from the very beginning in first year, your modules count towards your final degree, with the same weighting as modules taken in all other years. While I do think the expectations of first and second year modules here are slightly lower than at UCL (having taken a number of second year courses here that seemed a lot less conceptually difficult than second year courses at UCL), the fact remains that students have to be on it from Day 1 in order to keep that GPA up. At UCL, they cut you some slack and first year counts for very little, allowing you to adjust to university life and learn how to write and think more academically without as much pressure.

Finally, just the idea of taking 5 modules each semester for 4 years is stressful! It's a lot of work (compare it to UCL where we usually only take 4 modules each semester!) and this workload intensity from continuous assessment throughout the semester is not helped by the anxiety Canadian students face in trying to not lower there GPA.

Overall, while the UK degree system has it's own challenges, I feel it is more conducive to learning and academic growth because there is not the same extent of fear as in the Canadian system.