Methodology and sources

Every figure is derived from grade distributions published by the University of British Columbia, obtained through the UBC PAIR grade data project. Learn4Less does not collect grades and has no access to student records.

UBC suppresses any grade band that contains fewer than six students, to protect individual privacy. Some of those suppressed values are recovered upstream by subtracting the known bands from the reported total, which makes them estimates rather than counts. A dagger marks any figure that includes such an estimate.

Of grades. These are distributions of the grades awarded in a session, so a student who withdrew before a final grade was recorded does not appear at all. That is why the pages say a share of grades fell below 50 rather than a share of students failed — the second claim would require withdrawal data, which is not published for recent sessions.

Section figures are combined into a single course average weighted by the number of grades in each section, so a 400-student section counts for more than a 40-student one. Sections that report a headcount but no average, which happens when a section is small enough to be suppressed, are excluded from the average while still counting toward enrolment coverage.

Summer offerings are much smaller and draw a self-selected group of students, so their averages swing widely and interleaving them turns an eleven-year trend into a sawtooth. Summer sessions are still published in the tables, labelled as such.

UBC introduced grading accommodations during the pandemic, and it shows in the data: in MATH 180, for instance, the share of grades below 50 falls to 3.9% in 2020W against a typical figure closer to 18%. Sessions from 2020 and 2021 should be read as reflecting those policies rather than a change in how the courses were taught or assessed.

UBC stopped offering those courses after the 2021 Winter session. Their application streams became section letters on MATH 100 and MATH 101 — A for physical sciences and engineering, B for biology and life sciences, C for commerce and social sciences — which is why current MATH 100 sections are numbered 1A1, 1B1 and so on. The course descriptions remain in the UBC calendar, but no sections have been scheduled since.

UBC has published this data through more than one reporting system, and the systems disagree about column names and occasionally about completeness. Sessions up to and including 2021W are taken from the earlier report, and 2022S onward from the current one. Where both cover the same session, the more completely reported of the two is used — for 2021W that is the earlier report, which covers 193 sections against the newer report's 186.

No. The source data includes an instructor column, but it is not published here. It also mislabels teaching assistants as instructors in the 2019 to 2022 files, which would make any instructor-level comparison unreliable even setting aside the fairness of publishing one.