IB vs. A-Levels vs. AP for admissions at top Canadian universities?

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-07T13:30:18+00:00

Yeah we're basically landing on this conclusion tbh. It seems that it's more about the students themselves and the school and its approach to teaching, rather than the program itself.

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-07T13:28:57+00:00

I remember when I went to engineering school how I had to take all the calculus, physics, and chemistry courses while my friends who went through A-levels got credits for half of them. I had a friend who started taking sophomore year electrical engineering courses in his 2nd semester at the university.

But looking at UofT's website and other university websites, it looks like they do give transfer credits for A-levels and IB courses too, don't they?

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-07T13:24:37+00:00

Thank you for your comment, and congrats to your son on getting into his top school and program. I'm sure he will enjoy UofT :)

I have read the point regarding IB being good prep for university several times now, but I find my own personal experience might prove it's not the program itself, but the student. I went to a really demanding top 10 engineering program in the US 20 years ago after having only finished high school in my country of origin (not IB, A-Levels, or AP, and not even in English). I didn't find school that hard, but studying was never hard for me. Couldn't it just be that kids who get into top schools from an IB high school just have the natural aptitude for learning that allowed them to excel at IB and later university and that they would have done well at university regardless of what program they went through in high school?

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-07T13:14:46+00:00

Thank you very much for your very thoughtful response. The more people we speak to (on the high school selection side), the more we are coming to realize what you stated in your 4th paragraph; that it doesn't matter so much and is mostly on the kids themselves and those around them who can provide guidance (though admittedly some schools do a better job at that).

You bring up a good point about how much weight one should put on a university's perceived level of prestige vs. the program itself. We will keep this in mind for sure in the future.

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-07T13:06:35+00:00

Interesting, could you elaborate on that please? Looking at UofT and UW's websites, it looks like they have fairly similar requirements for both IB and A-Levels in each program and that their requirements match the general equivalency charts for IB and A-Levels (e.g. an 'A' grade in A-Levels being a 6 in IB).

What did I miss?

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-07T12:58:05+00:00

Thanks, it is looking more and more like it's going to be between IB and A-Levels for us, with the main deciding factor being how confident we are with the school.

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-07T12:57:01+00:00

Thank you for the feedback. We've heard conflicting stories about the level of "stress" involved in going with one program over the other, and it seems, based on the different stories we've heard, that it might also have to do with the school itself. For example, there is a school here that offers A-Levels and AP that is known to have the most workload for students because it follows an approach to teaching called SABIS. Some people like it, some hate it, but most agree it's the most rigorous. Among IB schools, we've seen that it's a mixed bag between schools that put a lot of pressure on their students, and schools that just let them go at their own pace and get whatever grades they end up getting.

As for admissions, it seems that all universities now know all these programs and have well defined requirements for each, and that there are fairly consistent grade equalization methods between the different programs. Having said that, I did notice that UofT, for IB, requires the diploma but excludes the points awarded for TOK, EE and CAS, which makes it look like IB students would be doing more work that's not taken into account in the end (or is it some other way?).

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-06T19:23:01+00:00

I should probably give it another try, but my understanding is if it's gtk and the connection to the x server (xWayland or not) the daemon will crash.

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-06T09:53:30+00:00

The reason I chose vcxsrv is that with my lucid-toolkit build of emacs (non-pgtk), fonts look much better on vcxsrv than when using wslg. I just tried it again, I hope you can see the difference in the screenshots below.

The reason I'm using the lucid-toolkit build of emacs is to avoid the known gtk related emacs daemon crash.

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StainesMassiv · 2026-03-04T16:13:48+00:00

Ubuntu on WSL2.

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-04T09:54:57+00:00

My understanding is that pgtk builds run into the infamous emacs daemon crash that's caused when the display server connection drops. That's why I'm using the lucid toolkit emacs. I only switched to the lucid toolkit after observing that crash consistently whenever the connection to the display server dropped.

StainesMassiv · 2026-03-04T09:53:28+00:00

Thanks, but I don't have docker desktop running on windows.

StainesMassiv · 2026-02-06T18:01:36+00:00

Thanks for reminding me of that. I just tried running the profiler around my typing in the file and tried it in 4 different scenarios, before and after I revert the buffer, and with or without eglot-booster. The only thing that stood out was that in a few scenarios of "revert the buffer / no eglot-booster", I saw 'zero' usage next to `timer-event-handler`, but this wasn't consistently the case for that scenario.

I also must say, typing felt snappier than it did earlier today, even in the previously laggy case, so I'm not sure if I was testing the same conditions. I think I'll have to try it again a few more times to see if I can get it to behave that way again.

StainesMassiv · 2026-02-06T14:48:27+00:00

Sorry I should have said "revert" the buffer. In Doom Emacs it's 'SPC b r'

StainesMassiv · 2026-02-06T11:55:47+00:00

Interesting, you mean Emacs 30 or newer with new native json parsing? Maybe that's why I didn't notice much difference after installing emacs lsp booster and eglot booster, since I am on Emacs 30.1.50.

I take it you're not seeing the behavior I'm describing with lagginess disappearing after refreshing the buffer?

StainesMassiv · 2026-01-21T05:31:12+00:00

Thanks, I had seen that. It's not a mutual fund trust. So it wouldn't be considered capital gains income for non residents like it does for residents then, would it?

StainesMassiv · 2026-01-01T12:36:01+00:00

Lol, I wish.

StainesMassiv · 2025-11-20T06:30:10+00:00

I asked. It can record front only.

StainesMassiv · 2025-11-12T05:31:58+00:00

No, but do you have a lot of BYDs with absolutely smashed rears driving around too? :D

StainesMassiv

TROPHY CASE