Ahmed Squalli Houssaini, private math and science tutor in Montreal

Montreal is one of the few cities in North America where a student can sit a French Baccalaureate on one side of the street and a Quebec ministerial examination on the other. Most tutors know one of those systems. I went through both: the French curriculum as a student, then McGill and Concordia as a graduate, and that is the reason a family moving between the two does not have to start over with someone new.

It matters in practice more than it sounds on paper. The French program teaches limits and derivatives a full year before the Quebec program does, and it teaches vectors much later. A student arriving from Paris into Secondary 5 is ahead in one place and behind in another, and telling those two apart in the first session is what stops a term from being wasted.

The same is true at the other end. A CEGEP student entering McGill discovers that 201-NYA and MATH 140 cover almost the same ground with different notation and a very different exam culture. Knowing where those two courses genuinely differ is worth more than another hour of practice problems.