What to do if you didn’t get the score you wanted

Getting a disappointing final year score could be a curveball that takes you somewhere unexpected and interesting, writes Paul Williams. That’s what happened for me.

Exactly 40 years ago I was about to enter my last two years of high school.

From that first day of Year 11 two letters hung over my head like the sword of Damocles: TE.

No, it wasn’t an arcane essay on Lawrence of Arabia. It was the feared Tertiary Entrance score that, our teachers told us, would forever brand our lives as indelibly as a forehead tattoo.

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Get a score close to the maximum of 990 on finishing Year 12 and you will live a charmed existence, the culture dictated. It would admit you to medicine, law, architecture, physiotherapy or engineering — even if you had no real aptitude or passion for these things — and a world of magical dreams. Big incomes, houses and cars would all be there for the taking.

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Principal of St Aidan's Corinda Toni Riordan with students Alice Baumann, Genevieve Rule and Phoebe McAuliffe who have just received their OP scores. Picture: Richard Waugh/AAP

But score at the other end of the scale and your life will be ruined. Destined for a dirty menial job (if you could get one at all in the economically bleak 1970s), you will be condemned to wear the crown of failure for life.

I don’t seem to remember any middle ground in that nightmarish scenario. The prospect of studying, say, history at university — or not going to uni at all but still landing a rewarding job — just wasn’t in teachers’ vocabulary.

Consequently, my last two years of school, like so many of my classmates’, were miserably stressful. The threat of the TE guillotine and its all-or-nothing three digit blade made those two years a living hell.

And my results reflected that environment. Throw in bored teachers’ penchant for teaching half-heartedly by rote, with no reference to real-world contexts, and it’s little wonder so many struggled.

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Student Luca Guirguis nervously awaits his OP scores. Picture: Tertius Pickard.

I’d like to say the TE score was replaced in 1992 by a kinder Overall Position (OP) system that mitigated these tensions. But that wouldn’t be true. Simply substituting 990 with an equally coveted OP1 removed none of the pressure on 17-year-olds. After all, what school leaver truly knows what their 40 year old selves would really like to do for a living?

Nor will that pressure be alleviated in 2020 when OPs are replaced by ATAR scores that will similarly reward recipients of 99.95, and panic those far lower on the ladder.

Sadly, there is no simple solution: university places — and jobs — for school leavers will always be in high demand. Competitive rankings of some sort must be used to decide who goes where. But to the thousands of disappointed kids, not to mention their worried parents, who logged onto the QCCA Student Connect site on Saturday morning only to find an OP score way below their expectations, I say this: It’s far from the end of the world.

In fact, being thrown an OP curve ball that challenges some longstanding plans may be a blessing in disguise.

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Ignatius Park College Student Ben Stewart 17, scored an OP1, but there any still many options for those who didn’t.

As a callow Year 10 student I still remember being counselled against taking “soft” humanities subjects in my senior years and was instead herded into the maths and sciences because “that’s what real students do”. The result? An uninspired two years of senior school and a not-quite-there TE score that locked me out of my first choice of university degree.

But I did gain my second choice and studied political science and history — and I’ve never looked back.

In short, there are many paths to success and a meaningful, rewarding vocation. University is just one of them. For those who don’t want to proceed to further education, remember that we live in age where hands-on skills, like social media production or other digital expertise, offer flexible hours and big salaries.

And for those still dreaming of attending university, there’s no immediate rush to enrol. If your OP was disappointing, take a gap year, or two, or five. Work and travel for a while. University will still be there. In my experience some of the best students — the hardest working and most creative — are those in their 20s who, having worked for a few years, are admitted as “mature” students whose life experience allows them to ace their studies.

Moreover, universities today place enormous value on quality learning and teaching, and offer extensive support to help students meet their goals.

And when we remember that today’s young Australian will enjoy not just a host of jobs but three or four entire career changes over 50 working years, a somewhat arbitrary OP ranking hardly seems important.

Just enjoy life’s journey and marvel at where it takes you.

Dr Paul Williams is a senior lecturer at Griffith University.