Program requirements
UBC admissions for the 2024/25 academic year will open in October 2023, the BCS application system will open for submissions shortly after UBC admissions are open.
You can find a detailed discussion of how the BCS program interprets and acts on the admission criteria along with a link to the formal UBC requirements and criteria on our How to Apply page.
Below is a very brief summary of the key requirements:
- A bachelor's degree
- in a non-computer related area, including sciences and arts.
- in computing science, if your knowledge is very out of date.
- Outstanding academic achievement. Given the highly competitive nature of admissions to BCS over the past three years, we will reject without complete review applications with a most recent 30-credit undergraduate UBC-equivalent GPA of less than 72%. We will give complete review to all applications above this cutoff that meet the remaining minimum requirements for admission, but we expect few or no applications with GPAs less than 75% to be competitive.
- Little or no programming experience, or outdated programming knowledge. (For reference, it is not problematic for a student to have the equivalent of as much as CPSC 110, 121, and 210. We consider cases where students have a small amount of additional background, although this may weaken the application. We consider computing background outdated if it is largely unused and from 25+ years ago.)
- BC Principles of Mathematics 12, or equivalent.
- Comfortable using computers.
- Communication requirement, 3 credits (any eligible course from the Faculty of Science's B.Sc. Communication Requirement) or a degree from a university in which English is the primary language of instruction
- $100 application fee (Interac, MasterCard, or VISA).
What we ask for on your application
You must be ready to provide the following in order to submit your application:
- Statement of purpose (max. 300 words)
- Qualifications statement (Evidence of MATH and English completion) (max. 300 words)
- List of degrees obtained and all post-secondary institutions attended
- Two references (email and phone contact)
- These references will be emailed a link to submit their recommendation online. Ask them to add "bcs-info@cs.ubc.ca" to their contact list, so our email is not marked as spam.
- You may submit a third referee name. We will quickly triage to determine which two we wish to read and review and may read the third but do not guarantee it.
- Resume
- Payment (non-refundable, $100)
Applications close 30th April, 2024. References must be received by 30th April, 2024. If you have questions about the application, please contact bcs-info@cs.ubc.ca.
Note: We are not able to answer questions about the status of your application before the deadline; you will be notified about the status of your application once it is assessed. Please refer to the BCS homepage for timelines and details.
If you don't have a CWL and you've already applied through EducationPlannerBC, please visit How to Create an Account under the Student Accounts (CWL Account Upgrader) section for instructions on how to create a CWL account.