Hello! I’m a grade 10 student from Canada. Basically, I’m in a dilemma. For high school, (starts in 10th here) I was accepted to an extremely selective, academically rigourous school. However, the teaching quality isn’t much higher than my district school, but the tests are much harder. My science mark has dropped dramatically to 85%, and my language arts mark has also dropped to 92%. I was wondering if I should stick with this school (it may or may not have name recognition in admissions for HYP) or move to my district school, where my marks would be higher but it may be suspicious because of the likely 10% jump. (At least in science)
FYI, I have plenty of extracurriculars that are appropriately ‘spiky’, so not as worried about that part of my app as I am my marks.
You’re in a tougher school-- it seems to me that the onus is on you to step up your game and show that you’re capable of achieving the same strong grades.
It’s not about the school, it’s about the student.
Basically, either you step up and are along the top 10-20% students at your new school, or switch to district school where you must be top 10%.
Since you’re a Canadian student, how will that impact your choices in Canada?
I’m retry sure that ranked, I would be among the top 15%, if not higher. I’m just worried about the fact that my 85% (actually went up to 87 after my term marks were released!!) might be considered ‘worse’ than someone else’s 95% if it doesn’t have name recognition
Thanks for all the advice! @MYOS1634 to answer your question, it depends on what uni I ultimately want to apply for. Canadian universities don’t look so much at specific schools as they do your average (except for rare programs like Waterloo Math) so they prefer a 96% student from a district school to a 95% from my school. For US universities, apparently my school has name recognition, although I’m not sure.