The Level I and Level II Supplementary Application questions are posted on our website in September.

Supplementary Application details are available here.

Supplementary Application details are available here.

Unfortunately, the Supplementary Application submission deadline is firm and no extensions will be given if this deadline is missed.

If you encounter technical issues while trying to submit your Supplementary Application answers, please contact the Honours Health Sciences Program Helpdesk before the deadline, and our staff will respond to your query during business hours Monday–Friday 8:30am–4:30pm.

We ask that you do not put your name in your Supplementary Application answers. Thinking more broadly than that, you also would not want to give enough information that would allow someone to find out who you were by doing a Google search. For example: 

• Do not say “as the gold medal winner in the biology category of the 2019 Sudbury science fair” … instead say “as the gold medal winner in my local science fair”
• Do not say “my dad is the only veterinarian in Kenora” … instead say “my dad is the only veterinarian in my small town”

You can be informal about citations in this context. If you want to refer to a piece of information you got from a website, a book, a paper or somewhere else, you can simply cite it narratively, for example:

• “According to Statistics Canada, the poverty rate was 15% in 2012.”
• “In her book, Michelle Obama said ‘Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?'”
• “In my favourite episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Holt tells Diaz ‘Every time someone steps up and says who they are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place.'”

If you are using someone else’s words or referencing a specific piece of data, for these purposes, you can simply give us a reasonable indication of where you got that from, without needing to use formal academic citation practices.

Rest assured that the odd typo or grammatical issue is not going to hurt your scores. We know that little mistakes happen. Our reviewers are instructed to ignore a few minor mistakes and focus on the substance of the submission unless the typos or grammatical problems impede understanding or suggest a pervasive problem in communication.

The Supplementary Application is an important aspect of the admissions process. It is an opportunity for you to demonstrate capacities that are not readily apparent from grades alone, share your experiences, thought processes and other things you would like us to know and understand about you. It helps us learn more about you as an individual that is not necessarily available on your high school transcript.

Your responses to the questions must be entirely your own. Discussion with others, including current program students, is not permitted. Posting answers to third party websites or online forums is strictly prohibited. Use of admissions consultants is prohibited. We do not endorse any of these enterprises and note that use of these services to craft your Supplementary Application is by definition a violation of academic integrity. Failure to comply with these terms is considered a breach of academic integrity and any violation is grounds for removal from the applicant pool (or removal from the program if such a violation is discovered after admission).

Applicants should be aware that companies and individuals offering to provide services to help students prepare their Supplementary Application for the Honours Health Sciences Program are not endorsed by McMaster University, and that claims made by such agencies that they are able to provide “insider information” about our admissions processes are unfounded. In general, there is a lot of misinformation about our admissions process on the internet based on spurious information, rumours and anecdotes. Information about our admissions process that cannot be substantiated by the information available on our website should certainly be viewed critically. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Further, any individual who is offered, and accepts, admission to the Honours Health Sciences Program but who, upon arrival at McMaster University, is determined to be inconsistent with the person portrayed in this application, will be asked to withdraw from the Program. Posting your answers on the internet, whether draft or final, use of paid admissions consultants, plagiarism, use of generative artificial intelligence, or otherwise working with others to prepare your responses is not permitted and may result in removal from the applicant pool or withdrawal of an offer of admission.

Honours Health Sciences Program faculty, staff and Level IV students review and score the Supplementary Applications. Each application is scored by multiple reviewers. Where there is a significant discrepancy in the scores given by the reviewers, an additional reviewer is assigned.

Grades and the scores on the Supplementary Application are the only elements we consider in making our admissions decisions and, in fairness to all applicants, we do not review any additional material.

Extracurricular activities are no doubt important in shaping your experience and skills but the availability of these opportunities varies widely and, thus, we do not use this as a consideration in our admissions process.