<p>Hi Mcgillians, </p>
<p>Can anyone elaborate about scholarships at Mcgill ? Do they have good/generous scholarships? </p>
<p>... and most importantly, how hard is to get an "A" ?</p>
<p>Thank you</p>
<p>If you are international, scholarships/grants are minimal and are limited to the topmost applicants. There are very few easy A’s at McGill.</p>
<p>how about domestics?</p>
<p>Domestic students tend to have an advantage over out of province students and international students for getting scholarships. However, there is set to be a significant increase in the amount of both merit-based and need-based scholarships for all pools of students due to the completion of the “Campaign McGill” fundraising program this past year which generated over $1billion. Of this amount over 60% of the money is going towards scholarships. [Campaign</a> McGill pulls in $1 billion : McGill Reporter](<a href=“http://publications.mcgill.ca/reporter/2013/06/campaign-mcgill-pulls-in-1-billion/]Campaign”>http://publications.mcgill.ca/reporter/2013/06/campaign-mcgill-pulls-in-1-billion/)
Now is probably the best time in several years to snag scholarship money at McGill.</p>
<p>As to the difficulty of getting an “A” it all depends on what courses you are taking: courses in the physical and life sciences and engineering tend to have lower averages and are hence “harder” to get an A in. Some of the Arts courses however have higher averages and are “easier” to get A grades in.</p>
<p>If getting getting A grades with little effort is very important to you I am sure you can find enough underwater basket weaving courses/majors at any university, including McGill.</p>
<p>But I always pictured Quebec schools as pretty hard-grading… despite the fact that As can be attained at 85% in some cases.</p>
<p>@Catria:</p>
<p>“Quebec schools” are a pretty heterogeneous group. Some have a reputation for grade inflation (I have heard that grades are high at UQAM). McGill has a academic reputation to maintain and if it just gave away A grades (especially in its flagship science courses) this would hurt the reputation of its graduates at other institutions (ie. if McGill pumped out a huge number of graduating A students then a McGill degree with a good gpa would be looked with suspicion at other universities when former McGill undergrads were applying to grad school). As such the grading distribution is maintained at a fairly constant level. McGill is reputed to have a fair degree of negative grade curving, but not as bad as schools like Toronto.</p>
<p>Again the difficulty of getting an A is also very different between what major you take even at the same university (eg. religious studies vs engineering)</p>
<p>85% A’s (4.0 or in some cases 3.9) can be achieved at schools like UofToronto too which is infamous for its down-curving of grades. However 85+% are not given out very often and the course averages generally range from 67% (C+, 2.3) to (B-, 2.7). The percentage value to get an A at many Canadian universities may be lower, but you correspondingly see a lot fewer of those high percentages handed out. It is just a different method of marking.</p>
<p>Thanks to both of you!</p>
<p>special thanks to NameleStatistic</p>