How does IRCC determine cut-off scores for Express Entry draws?

When conducting draws through Express Entry, the federal government does not make a decision about the cut-off score under the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) at which to invite candidates to apply for permanent residence.

What takes place is, in fact, the opposite.

The government determines the number of candidates to invite in a given draw, and then invites only the top-ranking candidates from the pool, with the cut-off score being the score of the lowest-ranking invited candidate.

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The cut-off score is thus determined by the composition of the Express Entry pool at the time the draw takes place.

For example, consider an amateur basketball team captain who decides to pick the five tallest players for his team. He goes and picks the five tallest. The shortest of these players is 6’2” tall. We could then observe that all players at least 6’2” tall were picked—but that doesn’t mean that the captain chose to pick “players at least 6’2” tall”; he simply picked the five tallest players available at the time. The players were chosen not because they were all 6’2” or taller; they were chosen because they were the tallest players.

This is how Express Entry draws work – the government invites the top-scoring candidates. The cut-off score in an Express Entry draw is the effect of the top XXXX number of profiles having been selected, not the cause of people above the cut-off having been chosen.

In other words, profiles are selected not because they are above the cutoff, but because they are the highest scoring. The cut-off score is simply a way of describing where the highest-scoring profile happened to fall.

In the event that more than one candidate profile would fall in the position of the lowest score, the government uses a tie-breaking rule based on the date of the profile submission, so profiles with scores precisely at the cut-off score, which were submitted prior to the tie-breaking date receive invitations, while profiles with the same score but which were submitted later are not invited.

Accordingly, an increase in the cut-off scores in CRS draws can result from smaller or less frequent draw sizes, OR it could result from an influx in high scoring Express Entry profiles, or an increase in scores among existing Express Entry profiles.

The decisions the government is making are the number of invitations to issue, the types of candidates to invite in each round, and the cut-off score is simply a consequence of those decisions.

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