In classrooms around Australia at this time of year, final-year high school students hunch over desks, furiously trying to distill and demonstrate years of learning and knowledge in their end-of-school tests. The ultimate result of these tests is an Atar, or Australian Tertiary Admission Rank.
It can be a confusing system to get your head around, so the University Admissions Centre has developed an animated explainer video. “If you’re struggling to understand what the Atar is all about, imagine that we’re talking about a fun run – like the Sydney City2Surf – instead,” the narrator says. “Your Atar is your rank in the HSC race.”
While students and schools can fixate on this end-of-school figure as a mark of their success, and many agree that some measure of scholastic achievement is essential for determining university entrance, Atar has come under criticism for treating learning as a race and for its limitations in considering individual skills and circumstances. More recently, as universities increasingly encourage students to apply with information other than their Atar (some studies suggest that less than a third of first-year students are offered a university place based on their Atar), the value of the Atar as a university entrance mechanism has been undermined.
So, we asked seven education experts and one student: if the role of Atar is to match students with the most suitable post-school pathway, is it fit for purpose? Here’s what they said.
‘The Atar is a completely unnecessary high-stakes element of learning’
Assoc Prof Rachel Wilson, centre for educational measurement and
assessment, University of Sydney
If we had a more sophisticated approach to exams and strengthened classroom assessment for the HSC, we wouldn’t need this additional calculation, the Atar. We need to design assessment with the learner experience in mind. We’ve all moved to the user experience in technology, but we haven’t done this in assessment in education.
We need a system that can be more inclusive so it must be built to the needs of the learner. Putting my psychologist’s hat on, this current generation have a lot of pressure on them that previous generations would not have had in their lives, and we need to be sensitive to those pressures. Asking them to deal with a completely unnecessary high-stakes element of their learning doesn’t seem productive.
A couple of things are important in assessment – children do learn for exams, but that is easier for higher-ability students, and much more challenging for lower-attaining students. We will always need a system for sorting when it comes to the provision of very high, and very expensive levels of education like university, but there are more effective and fair ways of doing it.
‘Some say the whole selection system is broken’
Sandra Milligan, director and enterprise professor, assessment research centre, Melbourne graduate school of education, University of Melbourne
When they were introduced, the Atar and its predecessors were welcomed. They were based on what is taught, not tests of “aptitude” or social status. The same rules applied to everyone. They were inexpensive for universities to use. And “scores” were reasonable predictors of success at university.
However, the idea of making such big decisions by exam-based ranking was a source of criticism right from the start. Do students who are best at exams make the best doctors or teachers or engineers or citizens? What about students who hadn’t had a fair go at school? Or students choosing courses to “not waste the marks” rather than out of genuine interest and commitment? Universities increasingly use evidence provided by principals or in interviews or via “portfolios”, or offering “bonus points” or “early entry”, or combinations of these. The great strengths of the Atar as a common currency – comparability, quality of assessment, book learning and transparency – are now increasingly at a discount. Students have to navigate a confusing array of cloudy options and shop around for the “easiest” option. Universities can tack this way and that to keep the numbers up. Some industry insiders even say that the whole selection system is broken.
The University of Melbourne’s Assessment Research Centre has been working with schools over a number of years to develop “new metrics of learning” that assess and report on more than just academic attainment, and which can support selection based on profiles of student capabilities and their match to course requirements. Learner profiles are informative about what a learner knows and can do, the standards they have reached, their interests and strengths, and their capacity to learn and keep learning, to collaborate, to communicate, to be good citizens. The assessments can meet rigorous standards of validity, reliability, comparability and transparency, and can be more inclusive. We think that in tandem with a successor to the Atar, assessments of general capabilities and associated profiles are the way of the future.
‘Atar pressures left me and my peers burnt out’
Angelina Inthavong, first-year student, Australian National University
By the end of grade 12, myself and many of my peers were extremely burnt out. There was a lot of pressure placed on obtaining an Atar by schools when my final actual Atar was basically useless due to my early entry offers. Atar was extremely stressful and had a negative toll on my mental health. The current system does not adequately adjust for people from diverse backgrounds and further perpetuates disadvantage. There are still huge disparities in resources and support offered between private schools, public schools and schools in rural and remote areas, which means private schools have higher densities of high Atars. Due to my low socioeconomic background my parents encouraged me to apply for scholarships to private high schools due to the perceived educational advantage. This in itself is a privilege; to have a supportive home life.
The Atar system is elitist, assigning a nonreflective rank to students when the starting line is unequal. It is filled with gaps that leave students ineligible for an Atar and doesn’t properly adjust for people’s backgrounds.
‘We need to rethink the whole system of university entry’
Jenny Allum, head of school at Sceggs Darlinghurst
The Atar is a rank – it simply outlines the order in which universities will make offers to students. That system is not perfect, but at least it is transparent. Universities will select students somehow; whether on the presentation of a portfolio, interview, year 11 results school by school, their own testing regime, or other information. The Atar is at least clear and equitable – a student anywhere, at Sceggs or in any other school in the state, could look at the cutoffs for the course of their choice, set a goal for the Atar they wanted to achieve, and know that the process of determining their Atar was blind to which school they went to, which suburb they lived in, what resources they had access to.
The proliferation of early offers from universities has undermined that process and we now have an opaque, clandestine hybrid system. Who gets an early offer? What schools do they go to? We need to rethink the whole system of university entry but let’s continue to strive for one which is fair and equitable to all, transparent and understandable, and one that inspires confidence in students, parents and the community alike.
The Atar isn’t fit for purpose. But we don’t want students to have to sit five different examinations because they are applying to go to five different universities. We don’t want the stress of the HSC to be passed down to the end of year 11 examinations because that becomes the basis for determining early entry to university. We don’t want highly socioeconomically advantaged students to pay graphic designers and recruitment firms to help them publish the best portfolio they can to present their achievements.
‘We are changing the narrative away from Atar’
Michael Saxon, principal at Liverpool Boys high school
At Liverpool Boys high school we are changing the narrative away from the Atar as the sole focus. We measure the student’s capabilities across all their courses, not treat each course in isolation, producing a deeper academic picture of the young person. We use HSC assessment tasks to produce a capability profile for every student. We measure these areas: communication and collaboration, attitudes and values, practical and organisational, research and critical thinking, and innovation and creativity. Every student at the end of year 12 receives an HSC/Atar and a Capability Certificate measuring their success in these areas, straight from HSC tasks. There is growing interest from our local employers in valuing these certificates.
Every student has a unique capability profile and this indicates what sort of university course, Tafe course or job they may be suitable for. Using a broad range of capabilities to match students to pathways has real meaning for students and potential employers. These are the capabilities employers and universities want, and the capabilities young people need to be successful in tertiary studies.
‘Australia is the only country that puts students under pressure for one number’
Pasi Sahlberg, professor of education at Southern Cross University
When the Covid pandemic first disrupted education and its traditional structures, there was a real opportunity to scrap Atar. It is noteworthy that Australia is the only country that sends students from high school to further studies or the world of work with one rank or value that is supposed to illustrate how competitive they are.
Most students never need their Atar anyway, so why do we continue to do this? Getting rid of the Atar would do away much of the between-student competition that distracts learning from deeper, interest-driven understanding (competencies) to narrow, surface-level adoption of knowledge.
What’s happening elsewhere? One common trend in places that have had high-stakes secondary school leaving examinations is to move towards assessment or qualification arrangements that reward students based on a wider range of competencies achieved in school that would benefit them in choosing further education or work. This would do away much of the unhelpful competition.
As many Australian experts have attested, Atar is not the best – let alone the only – way to predict students’ success in higher education. A better and less harmful way would be a competency-based reporting of students’ school performance and other passion-based merits gained during high school.
‘Atar exists in an education system that is not fit for purpose’
Hayley McQuire, co-chair of Learning Creates
A limitation of Atar is that it only represents a narrow scope of what young people know and can do – it does not reflect the full range of attributes that young people gain throughout their whole 12 years of schooling. However the Atar operates within a broader education system that is not fit for purpose in preparing young people with the skills and knowledge they need to navigate the future world of work, and the increasingly complex global issues that impact humanity. By broadening the way we value and recognise what young people learn, we would have the opportunity to think of new forms of credentials, new forms of assessments, guided by new learning ambitions.
No young person should leave school feeling like they have “failed”, but rather that the unique skill sets they hold match the pathways they’re passionate about.
‘Atar favours those who can handle the intensity of exam pressure’
Dr Pearl Subban, Monash University, former year 12 coordinator
The Atar reduces 13 years of schooling to a single number, quantifying every academic, social and psychological experience at school. Can a number be fully representative of all an individual’s strengths, knowledge and skill, gleaned over a decade of learning and collective interaction? Additionally, the Atar appears to favour scores obtained under test conditions, positioning those who handle the intensity of exam pressure much better than those who prefer self-pacing their learning. While the Atar provides an easily interpretable figure to universities and other tertiary institutions of how well a student can perform in the future, it may not provide an inclusive picture of a student’s overall ability.
A more balanced measure of how students perform may be more viable for the modern era. These could include assessments involving self-directed projects that consider effort, investment and personal discipline. Consequently, these self-applied tasks may yield a more accurate assessment of overall skill and knowledge than a single test result under exam conditions. A holistic figure which draws on interpersonal, communication and academic skill may also reduce the significant drop out rate of first year university students, as the Atar does not gauge tenacity.
