For a lot of Surrey families, UBC and SFU are the two applications that matter most. They are also different enough from each other that treating them as one process causes problems.
What follows is the practical shape of both. Always check the current requirements on each university’s own admissions pages before you rely on anything – programmes change their prerequisites more often than people expect.
The courses that decide eligibility
Both universities require English Studies 12 or English First Peoples 12, plus a set of approved academic Grade 12 courses. Beyond that, the programme decides.
If your child is aiming at Applied Science, Science, Computer Science, or business at either institution, Pre-Calculus 12 is effectively non-negotiable. Engineering typically also wants Physics 12 and Chemistry 12. Life-science routes lean on Biology 12 and Chemistry 12.
The decision that determines all of this is made in Grade 10, when the student chooses between Pre-Calculus 11 and Foundations of Math 11. That single choice is the most consequential one in the whole process, and it is made two years before anybody is thinking about applications.
How the two differ in what they weigh
SFU’s admission decisions are, broadly, more mark-driven. Get the prerequisite courses and the average, and the process is relatively mechanical.
UBC is not. UBC uses broad-based admission, which means a written component – the personal profile – sits alongside the marks and genuinely affects outcomes. Students with identical averages receive different decisions because of it.
This matters for how you allocate effort in Grade 12. A student sitting slightly below the typical UBC average for their programme gains more from a serious personal profile than from one extra percent.
The personal profile, and why it goes wrong
The mistake is treating it as a list of achievements. It asks about experiences and what the student learned from them, and the strongest answers are usually about something ordinary handled thoughtfully – a part-time job, coaching a younger team, looking after a grandparent – rather than a prize.
They are short. Every sentence has to carry weight. And they take drafting: a first attempt written the night before the deadline reads exactly like a first attempt written the night before the deadline.
Start in the summer before Grade 12, while there is time to write badly and then improve it.
Dates worth putting in a calendar
Applications typically open in early October. Both universities have deadlines in the winter, and some competitive programmes and scholarship rounds close earlier than general admission. Interim Grade 12 marks are submitted in the winter and drive conditional offers; final marks in July decide whether those offers stand.
Two things catch families out every year: scholarship deadlines that fall before admission deadlines, and the assumption that a conditional offer is the end of the story. It is not – the conditions are real.
Where a tutor is genuinely useful
Not for the application itself. For the two or three Grade 12 courses that are dragging the average down, and for making sure Pre-Calculus 12 is solid rather than survived, because it is both an admission requirement and the foundation of first-year calculus.
We work with a lot of Grade 11 and 12 students in Surrey on exactly that – Pre-Calculus 12, Calculus, Physics 12, Chemistry 12 and Biology 12. The broader planning picture is in our post on preparing for university admission in BC.
To talk it through, call 604-725-6845 or get in touch.
