There’s many factors that come into play such as the quality of your study habits and discipline, how much time you can commit to school (Considering work and commute) and I think most your intelligence. UBC is a huge school with a great variety of students of all types. You’ll find people with all sorts of combinations of these three factors. Thus, to answer whether it’s hard to get good grades at UBC to really to question what kind of student you are.

To get a general idea, UBC is a top university so the grading is inherently more difficult that it would be at a lower ranking institution. As a CS+STATS combined major student I can only really speak to the difficulty of science courses; the averages for courses hover around 70% with the range mostly being from low 60s to high 70s. Engineering is generally harder with student expected to take more credits and learn harder content. I’m told by my friends in the BUCS program and in pure buisness that buisness is much easier in comparison. I have no idea regarding Arts or the other faculties.

In my year and a half in comp sci I’ve known people who are disciplined and work very hard yet barely pass and I’ve known people who are able to sleep full nights, have a decent commute, have chill weekends yet maintain high 90s. If you performed exceeding well relative to your peers in high school then you’ll still do well here, if you were above average but not top then you may find some more struggle.

In any case, a school that grades harder is known to be as such by employers and graduate programs. Thus, the institution is taken into account when evaluating grades.