Last updated 16th May 2023

Prefer to listen instead? Check out the podcast episode explaining how ATARs are calculated.

In my last post I discussed what an ATAR is and how ATARs are used by tertiary institutions to select students for their courses. These tertiary institutions are realising more and more that other methods of selection are far more valuable, so we’re moving towards a better system, but right now having a higher ATAR does give you more options for courses in the year or two after you finish high school (after that you can apply as a mature-age student and there are different selection criteria). So as much as you might want to, it’s pretty hard to ignore while you’re in the thick of your final year of school. Let’s look at how ATARs are calculated and which parts are important if you’re interested in playing the game, so that you can forget about it and get on with having a great year.

Every state and territory in Australia has a different system, meaning that your ATAR will be calculated differently depending on where you’re studying. There are, however, a few key features that are universal:

• There’s at least one compulsory subject (usually English)

• Assessment tasks are written by your teachers throughout the year, and an external exam is completed by all students across the state/territory at the end of the year

• Final scores or rankings for your subjects are calculated and meshed together to give you an aggregate score.

• All the aggregate scores are listed from highest to lowest to create a ranking which becomes your ATAR.

When someone gets an ATAR of 70.00, it means that their aggregate score was in the top 30% of scores in their state or territory in the year they completed their schooling. If someone gets an ATAR of 93.5, their aggregate score was in the top 6.5% of scores in their state or territory in the year they completed their schooling. (See below for more information about this.)

So what this tells me, is there are a few things that you want to focus on when you’re preparing for your final year(s) of school:

1. If subjects are compulsory, they will definitely be used in the calculation of your ATAR. So even if English is your least favourite subject, if you want to do as well as possible, you need to do as well as you can in it.

2. If the assessment tasks I do throughout the year are different to what someone is doing at another school, then the exam at the end of the year is likely to be more important than each separate assessment task. So don’t stress so much about your result on each separate assessment task. You want to use each one to see where you’re at with that topic, and then to get as much understanding as you can out of it to help you prepare for the exam at the end of the year.

That’s it. If you focus on those two things, and study efficiently and effectively in all your subjects, the rest will get sorted all by itself.

If you’re interested in understanding the entire process, keep reading!

I’m doing VCE. How will my ATAR be calculated?

Step one: sac ranking

In each of your subjects throughout the year, you’ll do a series of SACs (you can check the VCE Study Design to find out exactly how many and what they’re focused on). The whole purpose of this is to create a ranking of all the students in your school who are studying the subject. So it’s important to note that at this point your actual marks don’t matter in terms of calculating your ATAR. The important part is where you are in the ranking for the subject.

step two: school exam results

At the end of the year, you’ll do external exams for each of your subjects, and the results of these exams are used in a couple of different ways.

Firstly, a percentage of your exam result will go towards your study score for the subject.

Secondly, the exam results for the students at your school are used to work out what SAC score you will be allocated to contribute to your study score for the subject. This might seem a bit strange, but the reason is that your SACs were written by your teachers, and the SACs of the students at every school were written by their teachers, so we need a way to compare the SACs at each school because the difficulty might not be the same across the board. That’s why I mentioned before that your actual SAC marks aren’t really relevant - an A+ at one school isn’t the same as an A+ at another school if the SACs are harder at one of those schools.

So the range and spread of the exam results for the students at your school are matched up against the range and spread of the SAC rankings, and the SAC score that will be allocated to you depends on where you sit in the SAC rankings.

Step three: study scores

Your exam result and the SAC result calculated for you are put together to create an aggregate score for the subject, and then these aggregates are ranked across the state for everyone who did the subject and mapped to a bell curve. Your study score tells you where you ranked against the other students in your state for that subject.

The highest raw study score you can get for a subject is 50. A study score of 40 means that you finished in the top 8% of the state.

Step 4: Scaling

If you’re reading this before you’ve picked your subjects for your final year, you will have heard about scaling and you need to know why you should ignore it. 

Once you get your study score for each subject at the end of the year, some will get scaled up or scaled down when they’re put into the magic calculation by VTAC that works out your aggregate score. The scaling happens to make the results in two different subjects comparable, and it’s based on how well each group of students in each subject did across all their subjects. So yes, theoretically if you choose a “hard” subject it will get scaled up, and if you choose an “easy” subject it will get scaled down. 

What you need to take into consideration though, is all of the issues around choosing the “hard” subject. If you love it, go for it! If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for a very painful year. Firstly, you will need to put in extra effort mentally to make yourself interested enough to study for that subject and to get over the mindset that it’s super hard and you can’t do it. Secondly, all that extra effort will take away from every one of your other subjects, so it’s highly likely that your other results will suffer because you chose a subject that scaled up hoping to get a couple of extra points on your aggregate score. And thirdly, if you don’t end up doing well in that subject, the extra couple of points might still be a low number to add to your aggregate score.

Save yourself the heartache and choose subjects that you’re actually interested in.

Step 5: Your ATAR is a ranking

Your top 4 scaled study scores (including English, EAL, Literature or English Language) are added together, along with 10% of your 5th and 6th study scores (if you did 5 or 6 subjects). Your ATAR reflects where your aggregate score ranks against every other student in the state. For example, an ATAR of 80.00 means that your aggregate was better than 80% of the state, or you scored in the top 20%.

but The ATAR calculator says I’m going to get…

STEP AWAY from the ATAR calculator. If you haven’t come across one yet, a quick google search will help you find one, but let’s think about what you’re doing here - you’re making a guess about the mark (or ranking, which is even more impossible to guess) you’ll get for each of your 5, 6, 7 subjects, and entering them in so that a “calculator” can make another guess about how each of these subjects will be scaled and put together to make your aggregate score, and then another guess about where in the ranking you’ll end up with that score to get your ATAR. You might as well go and get your tea leaves read. I know it’s not easy, but if you are focusing too much on your ATAR, I encourage you to take a step back and try to get some perspective instead of leaning in. Use the time to prepare for your exams instead.

The final word

It’s really hard to forget about the ATAR when you hear about it everywhere, but to actually achieve the best ATAR you can, your best bet is to focus on studying well in subjects you enjoy. Be smart about it, and don’t make life hard for yourself trying to beat the system.

Author: Kim Whitty

Ready to create a plan for your future, no matter what ATAR you get? That’s what I’m here for! Grab these digital resources to get clear on what you want and what course and career options you have, or learn more about the personalised career counselling packages I offer. I spent 13 years working in schools as a VCE teacher and qualified careers counsellor before starting Roadmap Education. Learn more about me.

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