Programs, beyond a single number

A university almost never publishes "the cutoff to get in this year is X." It publishes one or more figure types instead — the last-admitted score, a minimum required, a maximum, an average, or the low and high ends of a range — each tied to a specific year and cohort. MaCote keeps that structure intact: every figure keeps its year, its type, and whether it came straight from the university or from a cégep-compiled source.

When a university publishes its own numbers, MaCote always prefers them over a cégep-compiled figure for the same program — it's the closer source to the actual count. Law at Université de Montréal is a good example: the three figures published for the 2024 cohort (last admitted at 31.5, average at 33.2, maximum at 38.1) produce a range of 31.5 to 38.1 — not a number, a spread. That's exactly what the box above shows.

Every university program lists its own prerequisite courses, and MaCote tracks each one individually across three states: met, missing, or in progress. HEC Montréal's BAA, for instance, requires Calculus I, Calculus II, and Linear Algebra — three separate prerequisites, not one combined "math" checkbox.

That's a separate check from the R-score comparison itself. Your score can sit inside a program's range and you can still be missing a prerequisite — those are two different questions, and a cutoff range only answers the first one.

On top of its overall range, a program can require a minimum grade in one specific course — a per-course floor, distinct from the program's overall R-score. That's a real, separate requirement type, not a variant of the range: you can sit inside a program's range and still miss that one course's minimum, or the other way around. Most R-score calculators only track the single overall number and never surface this second requirement at all.

None of the programs currently verified in MaCote carry a confirmed per-course floor yet — the field exists in our data model and stays empty rather than showing a guess, the same rule we apply to any figure we can't source. If one gets confirmed, it'll show up next to that program's range, never folded into it.

Once you have an R-score — confirmed by your cégep or estimated by MaCote — the app checks it against every program's range and assigns one of four statuses: above, inside, below, or not yet verified. That last status doesn't mean "below": it means MaCote simply has no published range on file to compare against for that program.

In the box above, an estimated score of 32.41 falls between 31.5 and 38.1 for Law at UdeM, so it's marked "within range." That's not an admission guarantee — just your position against what was published for other cohorts. A range built from 2024 doesn't fix anything for this year's cohort.