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:

  1. 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    • in computing science, if your knowledge is very out of date.
  2. 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.
  3. Little or no programming experience, or outdated programming knowledge.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 We consider computing background outdated if it is largely unused and from 25+ years ago.)
  4. BC Principles of Mathematics 12, or equivalent.
  5. Comfortable using computers.
  6. 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
  7. $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.