Ahhh ATAR – that magic number, that turns up in a letter after exams, that determines your entire scholarly fate! What is it? What does it mean? Where does it come from? Not to worry, just check out my crash course on ‘What is an ATAR’ and all your questions shall be answered!
What is an ATAR?
ATAR stands for Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank. Your ATAR is what gets you into university, the ATAR you achieve will determine which university and course you will get into.
Your ATAR is a ranking, it is not a measure of your average score, it is a measure of how well you did in comparison to everybody else. So if you get an ATAR of 80 you did better than 80% of students – in other words your scores are in the top 20% of all student scores.
How is my ATAR calculated?
It is calculated using the average score of your year twelve subjects (50%) and your final exam score for that subject (50%). The University Admissions Center (UAC) is the organisation which calculates it. They scale your subjects up or down depending on the subject’s difficulty and how other students performed. Basically easy subjects get scaled down (as they are easy and it’s easier to get higher marks) and hard subjects get scaled up (as they are hard and more difficult to get good scores on). Scaling is done to even subjects out so that their scores can be compared. After scaling your top 4 subjects are used to calculate your ATAR.
Can I calculate my ATAR?
Your ATAR is calculated by the UAC after you have completed your exams.
However, you can use your year 12 subject averages (your teachers will tell you what they are before the final exams) to estimate your ATAR using an online ATAR calculator.
Remember: as you only know your subject averages and cannot take into account your final exam score you are only getting an estimate of your ATAR and not the final rank.
Relatably
So yeah – that’s the ATAR – if you’re a year 12 who has just finished congratulations woohoo! If you’re a year 11 prepping for year 12 – relax you’ll be fine – to take your mind off things why not check out our gallery of designs and pick out a year 12 jacket design for your school!
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