>>Extracurriculars, from what I recall, had no bearing on a high school graduate's university application. This also made it somewhat impersonal, but at least it was straightforward.

Ontario universities love extracurriculars now as the grades have inflated. The competitive top-tier programs require supplementary applications for each school. The Waterloo AIF in particular gets graded and then added to your adjusted high school mark, and is required for CS and engineering. I think other schools have supplementary ones that are sometimes optional if a program is less competitive.

When you have thousands of students with a 98%+ it becomes impossible to differentiate. Over 40% of Waterloo students graduated high school with a 95 or above.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/an-explosion-in-a-students-...

It's hard to do a cutoff when you're working with the top 5 percentage points of the scale. Too much noise in the signal.

>>Rumour was that this was also in full force over 25 years ago for all Canadian universities, not only Waterloo, and not just in the last decade.

You're probably right but it's only been public for about a decade. People started making FOI requests for the list and posting it online for anxious high school students. For context the numbers are the expected percentage points your mark will drop by from HS to university.

https://github.com/aayushh-patell/Waterloo-Adjustment-Factor...