How important is the atar?
“The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.” — Benjamin Mays
How important is the ATAR, really?
As you approach the end of high school, the ATAR is talked about more and more, to the point it may start to feel like the be-all and end-all of your education. In reality, it plays a much smaller role than many people realise.
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What is the ATAR?
The ATAR isn’t a mark or a score. It’s a rank, designed to compare your overall results to other students in your cohort. An ATAR of 75 doesn’t mean you achieved 75%, it means you performed better than 75% of students that year.
You may have heard about “scaling”. Your ATAR is calculated using subject results, then adjusted to account for differences between subjects. This can be a bit unfair – two students who put in similar effort and achieve similar assessment results may still receive totally different ATARs depending on their subject choice and the cohort’s performance. Because of this, your ATAR isn’t a true reflection of your individual ability, effort, or potential.
How does scaling actually work?
You sit your HSC exams and receive raw marks. This is the actual mark you receive from an HSC exam, unchanged.
Because different subjects have different amounts of marks in assessments and exams (some out of 80, some out of 50, etc), your raw exam mark and your school assessment marks are combined into an aligned mark out of 100 for easier comparison. This is the percentage you receive for your HSC results (e.g. 92%, a Band 6) and tell you how well you met the syllabus.
Your aligned marks are scaled to make it easier to compare across different subjects. Scaling depends on how the cohort performs overall. So, if students who did Physics performed well in their other subjects, a high mark in Physics will “scale” higher than another subject where students generally scored lower marks.
After scaling, each subject contributes a score out of 50 (so out of 100 for two-unit subjects). The 10 best-scoring units are taken and added together to get a total score out of 500.
Finally, these scores out of 500 are used to rank all students.
Your rank is the ATAR, which shows the percentage of students that you outperformed.
What can an ATAR help you do?
A higher ATAR can make one pathway to university easier. That’s about it. If you don’t want to go to university, the ATAR doesn’t matter at all. If you do, it’s just one of many ways to get in.
Past the end of high school, the ATAR has very little relevance at all. Employers generally don’t ask for it, and universities don’t look at it again once you’ve enrolled, even if you later change courses. That’s why most adults don’t really remember their ATAR – it stops being important. As you go through life, the focus shifts away from what rank you received and more towards what you’ve learned, the skills you’ve developed and the experience you’ve gained.
What this can look like in practice
Let’s say you wanted to study a Bachelor of Science. You may be able to receive an early, unconditional offer, based on your actual academic performance (not your scaled rank). If that option isn’t available, another pathway might be studying a Diploma in Science in a program such as The College at Western Sydney University. This pathway doesn’t require an ATAR at all, and often provides direct entry into the second year of a relevant Bachelor’s degree.
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Ultimately, the ATAR is a tool, not a judgement on you as a person. Your future is bigger than one result, and there are many ways to move forward into further study.
