<p>Because they don't care about some general "talent", they just want to know if you have a good chance to succeed and your grades are the best indicator of that. As for low character standards/qualities, I don't think the canadian student population differs from the American one. Well, except with respect to alcohol consumption...</p>
<p>Yeah, they aren't that different, but just recently I visited the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and I was trying to find a seat to eat at their cafeteria, yet no one's willing to lend me a seat.</p>
<p>I asked one guy whether or not I could borrow the chair beside him just for a little while to eat my lunch, yet that jerk off says that "you JUST can't sit here 'cause he says so." I got a pretty bad impression of the place after that, at least for its "outstanding" student population.</p>
<p>"aND the thing I hate about canadian schools is that they ONLY look at your "GPA and School marks". </p>
<p>How can you distinguish and identify talents just by labelling students with a set of numbers?</p>
<p>Perhaps that'd be the reason why some students on canadian campuses have really low character standards/qualities."</p>
<p>Yeah, I concur. grades are subjective anyway and standards differ from school to school. It really sucks that Canadian universities base everything on grades. Apparently, they could care less whether or not you're involved with activities outside of school. As long as you get good grades, even if you have a terrible personality and may not even be that smart, they'll take you over the kid with a slightly less than stellar average but has excelled in something outside of the school curriculum.</p>
<p>It's quite frustrating, really. They should at least implement some sort of standardized testing so that they can judge each student's aptitude 'slightly' more objectively. In terms of student body, the best Canadian schools really cannot compare with top tier American ones.</p>
<p>However, not all Canadian universities base their decisions on JUST marks. The best ones barely ever do that. Let's take Queen's Commerce program, once you make the cut-off mark, the decision is purely based on how well you complete your PSE which includes all your EC's, awards, passions, ambitions, etc. There's a similar supplementary application for Schulich and UofT's engineering programs as well.</p>
<p>But you still have to keep in mind that most Canadian students don't feel the pressure or the compulsion to pursue any particular EC(s), since the system doesn't not require them to do so. Pursueing passions and activities that are different from ordinary is simply based on a "voluntary" basis.</p>
<p>One could still get into a pretty prestigious university without anything except a 90+ transcript.</p>
<p>But then no Canadian student does ECs just because he/she feel forced to in order to get into fancy universities. Doing ECs just for the sake of university application is rather pointless if you ask me. You should do ECs because you want to, not to please the admissions of your college of choice.</p>