Is there a nation-wide university admissions test in Canada like SAT/ACT tests in the States? Also how do Quebec students go to universities in other provinces since high school only lasts untill grade 11 (followed by 2 yrs CEGEP)? Do they just spend a year at CEGEP?
There is no country-wide admission test for Canadian universities; every university sets its own criteria, although some of them join together to set common criteria.
I can answer your second question since I went to the University of Ottawa after finishing my cégep. The University of Ottawa, seeing how it admits many Quebec students by virtue of proximity, has an official procedure for admitting students from here. Basically, if you’ve finished your last year of (Quebec) high school with exceptional grades, you may be admitted directly to the University of Ottawa. (If you’re going in science, you’ll probably have to take calculus and algebra during the summer.) Otherwise, you have to do one year of cégep; if you do both years (which is what I did) you’re admitted to university in second year.
Other Canadian universities might have other conditions for admitting Quebec students. As for Quebec universities, they usually admit out-of-province students on the condition of doing an extra year with the required preparation courses (calculus, for example).
Note that most Quebec universities (McGill is one exception, at least was a few years ago, there might be others) have a rather sophisticated set of admission criteria for students out of cégep. When you study in a cégep, you are given a grade called the R score which is some statistical measure (the Z score, which is, if I’m not mistaken, more or less the distance between you and the class average scaled by the standard deviation) modified by another measure, the indicator of the strength of the group. In this document (warning: PDF) you may read about this grade. One of the goals is to ensure that students in more difficult programs aren’t penalized for the fact that their grades are likely to be lower. Some universities, though (McGill, maybe other Quebec universities, and every university outside Quebec) use the average grade for students out of cégep anyway.
Also note that when I was admitted to the University of Ottawa for my undergraduate studies, I had to apply not to the university, but to an organism that manages the admissions for every Ontario university.
Yes, the OUAC, Ontario Universities’ Application Centre ( http://www.ouac.on.ca/ )*. There’s a separate body for Ontario colleges, the OCAS (Onatrio Colleges Application Service ( http://www.ontariocolleges.ca/ ). My impression is that these are simply paperwork-managing entities; there is not necessarily any harmonisation of admissions criteria.
[sub]*I know someone who works at the OUAC. Not that that would help; she’s in IT.[/sub]
As someone who recently went through the process, I can tell you that you’re absolutely right. The universities are free to set whatever criteria they like; the OUAC is there so that students only have to apply to one organization(it’s all done over the web, in fact). Ontario students don’t even need to worry about sending transcripts; the guidance dept in each Ontario high school sends the transcripts directly to the OUAC, who forwards each student’s transcript to the universities to which the student applied.
As far as I can tell, the primary admissions criteria for students is their marks in their grade 12 courses.
What species is the Canadian Admissions Organism?