Despite the bad rap it occasionally gets for being difficult to understand, many students have always known our dear R-Score as a relatively simple formula: (Z-Score + IFG + 5) × 5, where IFG, or group strength index (indice de force de groupe), equals (High school average – 75) / 14 (if you haven’t read our R-Score breakdown, it will provide useful background before reading this article). As authors of a website dedicated to analyzing not only university admissions but also the R-Score itself, we were evidently intrigued when the media reported on Monday that the Ministère de l’Éducation et de l’Enseignement supérieur would implement a modified R-Score calculation, starting in the Fall semester of 2017.

In our first semester of CEGEP, we often wondered as students how grades might correlate to R-Score values, and indeed first-years can often be spotted obsessively using rscorecalculator.com. Knowing only their approximate grade and lacking information for the class average, standard deviation and high school average, they confidently make up dubious values for those three numbers. At RScology, we performed a statistical analysis on numerous R-Score data points obtained during our own studies to extract those values, thus generating the very first publicly available R-Score dataset available online.