University entrance: fewer students rely on ATAR

Only a quarter of students gain undergraduate course entry based on their ATAR so what is the point of the Year 12 ranking system?

“The ATAR has taken on a life of its own, and is now … seen as the ‘results’ from 13 years of schooling,” the paper says.

The proportion of students entering university on the basis of their ATAR score has continued to plummet, leading a respected think tank to ask whether the “number is up” for the Year 12 student ranking system.

In a new report, the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University says that only 26 per cent of domestic students entering undergraduate courses in 2016 were admitted on the basis of their Australian Tertiary Admission Rank score. This is down from 31 per cent in 2014.

“The question parents, students and teachers should be asking today is, if ATAR doesn’t matter for three-quarters of undergraduate admissions, why is it treated as the most important outcome of 13 years of schooling?” said Mitchell Institute director Megan O’Connell.

Ms O’Connell said that schools could help prepare teenagers for lifelong success with a broad range of knowledge, skills and capabilities, “but this is often overlooked in favour of teaching content for high ATARs”.

The report’s authors, Mitchell Institute policy fellow Sarah Pilcher and policy analyst Kate Torii, acknowledge that the ATAR is a “useful, transparent tool” for universities to select students for high-demand courses.

But with the growth in university places and the number of students starting undergraduate degrees up by nearly half in the past decade, universities now enrol more and more students from non-ATAR pathways. These include vocational education awards, mature-age entry and professional qualifications.

The report, titled Crunching the Number: Exploring the Use and the Usefulness of the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank, says the ATAR does not show which subjects a student has done well or poorly in — “information that would be useful for admissions decisions”.

The report also says the narrow focus on the ATAR score can “create significant stress and anxiety for final-year school students”.

“In the absence of other ways of recognising success at the end of schooling, the ATAR has taken on a life of its own, and is now … seen as the ‘results’ from 13 years of schooling,” the paper says.

In the report the authors acknowledge there needs to be a filter mechanism to select students for university courses. But they point that other systems can do this job and many of them are already in use, including aptitude tests, entry schemes based on disadvantage or family background, study in pathway or enabling courses, and the use of interviews, portfolios, auditions and essays.

However, they stop short of recommending an end to the ATAR system, saying there is no simple solution because it is part of a large and complex picture.

“Many of the problems we associate with the ATAR are really symptoms of a broader disjuncture in the way we think about education and training pathways for young people,” the report says.

“To move forward, we need to acknowledge that secondary and tertiary education form part of one ongoing learning pathway.”

The real challenges, it says, include finding the best ways to match students to the right courses (whether in higher education or vocational education), maintain transparency and ensure that able students are not held back ­because they come from a poor background or have other disadvantages.