Isn't the Canadian school/college/university thing a joke anyways?
One of my cousins in Ontario told me that they only use certain classes and grades to determine eligibility for university.
<-- Canadian Citizen. Not Canada bashing, honest question.
... They remove grades from classes like phys Ed and art, I believe. Which honestly seems fair.
When I graduated in Alberta (mind you, this was during the Stone Age when we had to submit our application on carved tablets because papyrus hadn't been invented yet)... there were several different considerations that affected your eligibility as a student.
First, there was the question of whether you graduated and met the requirements of your particular school. Each student had to meet provincial standards and complete certain core courses in some stream or another to get a diploma, and there were also physical education and life management courses that were mandatory. Religious schools required courses in religious studies, language schools required courses in a foreign language, and so on. You also had to have enough option courses to earn 100 credit hours over what usually lasted three years, although students who did music or other after-school options could sometimes graduate with nearly twice as many credits as they needed.
If you didn't have a diploma, you couldn't get into a university. You could get a GED (by passing some tests) and perhaps get into a trade school or college, or you could go back and upgrade for a year until you met the diploma requirements, or you could even go to an adult school or night school if you had a special situation like a long illness or were a recent immigrant who didn't speak the language. But generally flunking out of high school excluded you, for life, from a university degree. The prevailing cultural assumption (which wasn't necessarily true) is that whatever problems had kept you from getting through a highly structured curriculum such as high school would most likely continue and interfere with your success in a less structured environment.
Next, there were the "core" courses, which were Math, English, Humanities, and one science which had to be Biology, Chemistry, or Physics as opposed to a general science course. Each of the courses had to be from the matriculation stream, not the survival stream which was watered down and focused on things that applied to everyday life (as opposed to university prep). The system allowed people to take an extra year to upgrade and get through the matriculation stream, so as to proceed at a slower pace if they needed to. Slower streams existed in Math and English, and possibly other courses, but only the last year of the matriculation stream counted toward admission. The grade in each course was half based on your school work and half based on a province-wide Departmental exam which was given at the end of the year. This was to help combat grade inflation and to ensure students from across the province were assessed based on their actual skills, removing the teachers' subjective bias and judgment. The arithmetic mean of your grades in these four courses, your "core" grade point average, was the primary number that affected your eligibility.
If any of your grades in core courses were too low, or if you were in a special program such as a fine arts program that justified your acceptance without having the basic skills to get by, you would be flagged as needing remedial 100-level courses in that area in addition to your regular course work. These remedial courses would act as extra prerequisites and did not count toward your university degree.
Third, there was your overall grade point average in your final year, including your option courses (which didn't have departmental exams). Because of the lack of objectivity in awarding grades, nobody cared much about overall GPA compared to your core grades. Fourth, there was your cumulative grade point average across grades 10, 11, and 12. This mattered even less than your final year GPA, because nobody cared how well you did in make-work classes. In some cases it was a decision factor affecting whether you were eligible for scholarships, or could be used to show that an otherwise good student deserved an opportunity despite having had one bad year.
Fifth, when you applied to some programs like music, engineering, pre-medicine, or athletics, there were extra entrance requirements but also some scholarships you could apply for if you were well enough qualified. Individual departments could require you to pass an audition or entrance exam, to have specific option courses, to be fluent in a particular language, or to have higher grades than were required for general admission.
Finally, if you'd earned an "A" ranking in your amateur sport, you could apply to a university that had an athletic team and obtain sponsorship for competition if you studied there, but only if you qualified for admission. There was no such thing as relaxing the rules to get a special athlete to sign up.
There was no such thing as a mandatory essay, mandatory volunteer work (a conflict in terms if ever there was one), or special consideration because your parents or elder sibling went to the school. Also, the tuition rate was the same for everyone. There wasn't a sliding scale based on parents' perceived ability to pay, and a parent's income did not influence whether a student was eligible for a student loan.