A Breakdown Of The ATAR

What is an ATAR? does my internal assessments matter? Does picking harder subjects scale better? There are so many questions surrounding ATARS, and in this post we decide to break it down and help you guys out. *

*Please do note, that the ATAR is a rank, and so it will be based on how well your year group across Australia does.

** Also stop using ATAR calculators, they are bs lol

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What is the ATAR?

The word itself stands for, "The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank". Each student is given a number from 0.00 to 95.95 (in increments of 0.05) that tells them their rank relative to every student sitting the HSC that year (Not just their own year group, everyone graduating that year across Australia).

The ATAR is used by universities when offering courses to students during the various offer rounds at the end of their graduating year and the beginning of the year after, and can be effected by many factors; such as school ranking, scaling, and your overall performance during year 12.

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How is the ATAR Calculated?

Before we go into how the ATAR is calculated, we need to talk about internal and external assessments. Internal assessments refer to your schools assessments over year 12; these are usually trial exams, depth studies, major works, speeches, presentations and/or essays. Your external assessments are your actual HSC exams.

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Everything to know about scaling

The popular questions you will hear when talking about scaling is: "Does harder subjects scale better?", "Should I do a harder course so it scales better?", and "If I do extension subjects will I scale better?". And yes some of them are true, but there is a lot to talk about to understand scaling.

Firstly, lets tackle the whole "Harder subjects scale better" thing. The point of scaling is to make the playing field a little more even and to recognise the efforts that different subjects require. Lets pretend that scaling wasn't a thing, it wouldn't be fair to say that someone who scores a 80% in agriculture is equal to someone scoring an 80% in extension two maths. Although the mark is the same, the level of effort and skill required to obtain those marks are very different.

So to compare subjects equally, 'harder' subjects will scale 'better' and 'easier' subjects will scale 'worse'. Lets go back to our example, if we want to directly compare those two scores, we would need to scale them. Now, the agriculture mark may scale down to a 60% while the extension two maths may scale up to a 90%. Now we can fairly compare the subjects, and the students marks. (Of course scaling doesn't effect your marks this much, but this is an exaggerated example to help you understand how it works)

How much a subject scales however depends on where you sit. The general scaling of a subject is a bell-curve shape, as shown below.

This means that if you are sitting on the right hand side, you will generally be scaled well (relative to the subjects scaling). However if you are sitting in the middle to left hand side of the graph, scaling will generally have a negative effect (or no effect).

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Is School ranking really that important?

YES! I cannot stress this enough! After looking at my ATAR before and after school scaling, I was scaled down by 10 whole ATAR points. On the other hand, my boyfriend put in minimal effort all year, but got an amazing ATAR in the 90s all thanks to his prestigious school.

If you are needing an extremely high ATAR, I would highly suggest taking your school into consideration.

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So that's pretty much it! I hope this has helped you guys out, because I know that my careers advisor did a shit job at explaining it to me lol.

Anyway, go show our instagram ( @nesa.meemees ) some love, and feel free to DM us any questions you might have. x