Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre statistician Dr Diah Wihardini said every year 12 result was used in the scaling process, even though only about half of students are eligible to receive an ATAR.
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To get an ATAR, students must do five general subjects, or four general subjects and an applied, vocational or certificate III subject, and they must pass English.
“We are using all of the subject results, or all of the scores that we receive … because we want as many data [points] as possible,” Wihardini said.
Subjects that are not considered competitive, which is common when fewer students are angling for an ATAR, can scale poorly.
However, an outstanding individual score in these subjects can still work in a student’s favour, while in a highly competitive subject, it’s more common for individual results to be scaled down.
Industry experts in the arts have criticised subject scaling, saying creative courses were being increasingly avoided because students were worried it would negatively affect their final result.
QPAC chief executive Rachel Healy has been critical of how performing arts subjects are scaled.Credit: Lyndon Mecheilsen
Queensland Performing Arts Centre chief executive Rachel Healy said enrolments in these subjects – including visual art, music, dance, film and drama – had fallen by about 44 per cent since 2021.
“The consistent message to students, parents, and school-leavers is that choosing performing arts subjects will result in ATAR disadvantage,” she said.
“The continued decline or potential loss of general drama, music, and dance would significantly narrow Queensland’s arts education landscape.”
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Kira Hansen said that at her school, she noticed students were pushed towards science subjects if they were aiming for tertiary courses that demanded high ATARs.
She said many science students achieved high grades, but others in her year found the strain of juggling multiple demanding subjects pulled their marks down.
How is the scaling done?
Each year, QTAC receives the raw scores of about 50,000 year 12 students in up to 90 subjects taught across the state. Its statisticians then spend about three days scaling each student’s score.
This is done by pairing a raw score with a figure representing how all students performed in that subject and across their overall studies.
QTAC uses a regression function that matches each set of subject scores with its own S-shaped trend line. This shifts some scores up and others down.Credit: Catherine Strohfeldt
The two values are plotted on a graph and run through an algorithm dozens of times, forcing them into a set S-shape. This scales some individual scores up, and others down.
QTAC statistician Kyle Crompton says the process is complete when the values stop shifting because the line and scaled results are as close to touching as they can be.
The scaled scores are then checked by a committee, and can be sent back in fringe cases – often caused by class sizes that are too small.
From scaled results to ATAR
After scaling, students are assessed for their ATAR eligibility.
Eligible students’ best-five scaled subjects are added together and ranked on a 2000-point scale, which is their ATAR.
In Queensland, about 35 students sit on each rung, from 0.00 to 99.95, but individual results are not published for students whose ATAR is below 30.
Subjects can be too competitive
While some subjects continue to scale well against others, Crompton says when everyone has high marks, it can hurt individual scores.
“If everyone’s getting a 100 in a subject … we can’t tell apart the highest-achieving student from the lowest-achieving,” he said.
Five years into the new system, he said most teachers and students had become better at teaching and taking assessments, pushing average grades higher year-on-year across every subject.
“If you’re a 90 in one year and next year you’re a 95, you might be in the same relative position,” Crompton said.
When the new curriculum comes into effect next year, students would likely see their results plummet, but it would not greatly affect ATAR scores, he said.
In fact, top-achieving students could end up benefiting.
Queensland’s ATAR results will be released next Thursday, December 18, via the ATAR portal.
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