With exams over and marks on their way for this year’s graduating class, many students hold their breath in anticipation for what they have been working towards for the majority of their adolescence: their ATAR. Having graduated from the International Baccalaureate (IB) myself in 2021, my heart goes out to each hard-working student hoping for results reflective of their effort. However, statistics from recent years provide troubling insight into the usefulness of the ATAR system, only further exacerbated by the growing number of dissatisfied students.
Secondary school graduate Cody Hargreaves is critical of his ATAR experience; he explains how problems in ‘the structure and scaling ATAR’ make it ‘inherently skewed towards subjects related to STEM, leaving more creatively inclined students scrambling for a foothold.’
The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) is a number between 0 and 99.95, which indicates a student’s position in relation to their peers. Unlike other standardised systems, such as the International Baccalaureate (IB), ATAR students are not given marks which reflect their achievements. Instead, their marks are scaled across disparate subjects to account for differences in ‘difficulty’ between subjects, resulting in a ranking, which universities use to select top students.
Within Australia, both the IB and Vocational Education Training (VET) programs have been gaining attention as potential pathways separate from ATAR. IB is primarily aimed at preparing students for higher education, with as many as 78 per cent of IB graduates going on to higher education. VET programs are intended for students who wish to either enrol in TAFE or enter the workforce upon graduation, focussing on workplace experience and skill development. Students graduate with nationally recognised qualifications and skills required for specific industries such as hospitality, tourism, and health services. Furthermore, as Australia’s skills shortage has nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022, there is a growing need for industry ready graduates with the appropriate qualifications. Both systems are targeted towards specific groups of students, allowing them to specialise and compliment their own method of teaching, without excluding large groups of students.
Despite the rising popularity of alternate systems, the ATAR remains the default and dominant system within Australia, and therefore should cater for the majority of students. But it doesn’t. ATAR is inherently designed for students entering university, with knowledge-based assessment reflective of higher education environments, but inapplicable to most career paths. Jarring statistics portray a very different reality for the majority of Australian students. To begin with, only