How will my ATAR be used?

Last updated 28th June 2022

Before every Aussie teen even starts Year 12, it’s an acronym that they’ve heard over and over - at school, at home, at family get-togethers, on social media. Despite the best intentions of the teachers everywhere, it's hard to focus on anything but your ATAR. So let’s look at what it actually is, and then let’s be real about why you can forget about it and get back to focusing on the things you can control at school.

So what do you need to know about ATARS?

The only things that you need to know are:

How it is used
What is used to calculate it

How is your ATAR used?

ATAR stands for Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank, and knowing what it stands for actually goes a long way to highlighting its only purpose - to rank students in a particular year based on their results, so that universities and other tertiary institutions can streamline the offer making process for tertiary courses.

Every state and territory in Australia has a different curriculum and different rules about how many subjects that you need to do and which ones are compulsory, but in recent years they’ve all found a way to use the results students get in exams and assessment tasks to rank them in a way that lets tertiary institutions choose their intake relatively easily.

Each course has a certain number of places available. Let’s look at a simplified example and pretend that a course has 50 places available. Once students have been given an ATAR, the tertiary institution that is offering the course can look at all the students who have applied for their course, put them in order from the highest ATAR to the lowest, and offer a place in the course to the top 50 (the process is more complicated than this, including special entry access and other criteria, but you get the idea). The ATAR of the last student offered a place is listed as the lowest selection rank for the course on the state/territory Tertiary Admissions Centre (TAC) websites to give the students in the following year an idea of what sort of ATAR they will need to get to enter the same course.

“What this really means is that the courses with higher listed ATARs have just won a popularity contest. ”

It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a better course, or a more difficult course. When a course has a high ATAR, it just means that more students are applying for it, so the tertiary institution offering the course can make the cut at a higher level to fill all the places they have available. Once you regularly need to get a high ATAR to be offered a place in a course, families and students start to see it as more prestigious, and some students start to aim for it even when they’re not really interested in it.

what does this mean for me?

The good news is that tertiary institutions are starting to use other methods to better choose the right students for their courses. They have realised that results alone aren’t a good indicator of whether or not a student will finish their course or do well in it. They might use an application process, portfolio or interview to get a better idea of how interested the student is in the course they’re offering, which helps them choose the best students for their course. Having the students that are the best fit for the course is better all round - students and teaching staff are happier, and students are more likely to finish their course so the tertiary institution doesn’t have to waste money filling the places of lots of students that drop the course when they realise that it’s not really for them.

So, while your ATAR might still help you get into a course, it’s becoming much less relevant than it used to be.

As well as this, you need to remember that there’s no point in focusing on something you can’t control.

You can’t control what ATAR you get.

You can control a whole range of other things that will lead to better results and might help you get into the course you are interested in, like studying efficiently and effectively, looking after yourself so you don’t burn out, preparing a great portfolio or getting work experience in an area you’re interested in so you have something relevant to talk about in an interview. Focus on the things that will actually make a difference to how well you do, not the ranking that is impossible to control and that someone else will work out for you anyway.

In the next post, we’ll look at how the ATAR is calculated, and, again, why you should forget about it and just do your best.

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.