The distribution of R scores
The curve of R scores
The ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur provided myRScore with the overall R score of every student who started university in fall 2023, by CEGEP program family.
Show the data
| R score | Share of students | Students |
|---|---|---|
| 21 or less | 0.6% | 130 |
| 22 | 1.4% | 299 |
| 23 | 2.6% | 561 |
| 24 | 4.6% | 989 |
| 25 | 6.7% | 1,438 |
| 26 | 8.6% | 1,852 |
| 27 | 10.2% | 2,182 |
| 28 | 11.5% | 2,462 |
| 29 | 11.3% | 2,413 |
| 30 | 11.1% | 2,375 |
| 31 | 9.6% | 2,064 |
| 32 | 7.8% | 1,668 |
| 33 | 5.7% | 1,214 |
| 34 | 3.8% | 819 |
| 35 or more | 4.5% | 970 |
Key figures across all programs
Half of the 21,436 new university students had an R score between 27.0 and 31.7, for a median of 29.3, and about 14% had an R score of 33 or more.
The R score formula assigns 25 to a student right at the average of an average class. New university students have higher R scores, since it is mostly the best CEGEP students who go on to university, so the curve only describes these students.
A good R score
An R score of 30 is higher than that of nearly 6 out of 10 students who started university, and an R score of 35 is in the top 5%. A good R score still depends above all on the program you are aiming for, and the admission R scores show that of the last admitted students in each program.
By CEGEP program
Students coming from Science have the highest R scores, with a median of 31.4, and 12% of them had an R score of 35 or more. The median is 28.7 in Social Science, 28.6 in Arts and Letters and 27.4 in technical programs. Double DECs and students without a program family, 1,700 in all, only count in "All programs".
What a grade is worth in R score
No official table converts a grade into an R score, since the same grade is not worth the same R score from one class to another. To give an order of magnitude, myRScore applied the official formula to the roughly 275,000 course classes in Quebec from winter 2022 to winter 2026, each class weighted by its number of students. The typical R score is the median, the middle value.
| Grade | Typical R score | 8 times out of 10, depending on the class |
|---|---|---|
| 60% | 19.4 | from 12.6 to 23.9 |
| 65% | 21.1 | from 15.1 to 25.3 |
| 70% | 22.8 | from 17.6 to 26.8 |
| 75% | 24.6 | from 20.0 to 28.3 |
| 80% | 26.5 | from 22.3 to 30.1 |
| 85% | 28.8 | from 24.8 to 32.2 |
| 90% | 31.2 | from 28.0 to 34.4 |
| 95% | 33.6 | from 31.7 to 36.8 |
In these classes, the average is around 79%, so a grade of 80% is barely above average. In a typical class, it takes about 92% to reach an R score of 32.
These values concern a single course, whereas your overall R score is the average of the R scores of all your courses. The calculator estimates yours with the real average of your classes.