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[quote=Anonymous]We looked at McGill and there are a few potential downsides I want to mention, and OP you should see if this is McGill-specific or if it applies to more CDN universities.

At McGill, you apply to either a BA or BS program (and there is also a BA&BS or something like that).  They have different stats for entry and their website has the last class's cut off stats.

There are three issues with that.  The first is, they are pretty unforgiving, I think my DD got a B in 9th grade science so she was out of the running for the BS application even though her SAT and other grades were way above the cut offs.  And they don't care if it was an AP class or not.  So it's a little arbitrary.

The second issue was that after you are in the school, it's hard to switch over from BA to BS or vice-versa.  You are really tracked.

At the time, my high school senior was considering pre-med.  Since she had that B in 9th grade science (or something like that, can't remember), I checked into an option that's sort of easy in American colleges, which is:  Could she get a BA in history or something, and take the science classes so she'd satisfy the pre-med requirements?  The answer was that this would be near impossible, because the BS tracked kids were given priority on the science classes and there would likely be no space for her.

Implied in that was also that it sounded like kids get shut out of classes.

In my kid's case, she went to an American university in pre-med, and became one of those infamous statistics of kids who realize it's not the road for them.  So she's history now.  I think, wow, what if she had not been shut out of McGill's BS program...and went there and got her clock cleaned in STEM...and couldn't transfer to a BA major?  Yikes!!

So those are my only thoughts of downsides, OP.  Otherwise, seems like a great option.  Hope this helps.[/quote]

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