The world changed for our universities with the release of the Bradley Review earlier this year.
One of the most significant changes is that universities will have to meet targets to increase their ‘participation of low socio-economic status students’. In other words, they must increase the number of kids from disadvantaged backgrounds gaining university degrees.
This will put pressure on the way universities traditionally select school-leavers for courses – by ranking every Year 12 student on a percentile scale with a system called the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, or ATAR.
Before I go on, I should say it’s common in NSW to confuse the ATAR – formerly called the UAI and before that, the TER – with the Higher School Certificate.
The ATAR is issued the day after the HSC results come out in December. Since it is a number between 0 and 100 (actually 0 to 99.95 this year) it is often mistakenly referred to as a percentage, a score, or ‘marks’. It is none of these things.
The simplest analogy to describe the difference is to think of the HSC as your full report card and the ATAR as your rank in the class.
The NSW HSC is one of the most recognised and well-regarded school credentials in the world. Its main purpose is to summarise each student’s achievements at the end of schooling.
The ATAR is derived from the HSC. The ATAR uses HSC data but is a separate and independent ranking process, constructed and owned by universities. Universities have a right to change the rank or not use it, as they see fit, to determine access to their courses.
A recent newspaper report claiming that the HSC was a ‘blunt instrument’ for university entry is an example of the confusion about the HSC and ATAR. As was clear from the rest of the story, some universities are concerned that the ATAR – not the HSC - will not be sufficient to help them broaden their enrolment base.
When universities say that they want to look outside the ATAR to identify talented individuals who may achieve well at university, they are thinking constructively. They are not challenging the HSC.
The ATAR is a convenient ranking method for universities, but it may not be the most sensitive instrument for picking up individual talents and abilities and is a limited way to match students to courses.
The HSC provides an enormous range of reliable and clear information on each student. In many countries, the school exit credential isn’t reliable enough and students must sit a separate university entrance exam. In NSW the validity and thoroughness of the HSC is the reason the universities use it to calculate the ATAR.
Unlike many other credentials that are used for university entrance the HSC examines the extent to which students know and understand the actual school curriculum. This means that students don’t need to second-guess what the substance of the examination will be. Each student’s results are therefore much more likely to reflect their capacity and their work, rather than social advantages or disadvantages.
The focus on the school curriculum also means that the HSC can report in detail what students know, understand and can do, not just where they are ranked compared to other students.
There are more than 100 courses, with different levels of difficulty and different topics of interest within each course. While no school can offer every HSC subject, Board of Studies data shows the 68,000 students mix these subjects in at least 27,000 different ways each year.
This variety allows the fullest possible range of student talents and abilities to find expression in the HSC process. Achievement in English, mathematics, history and science is complemented with the chance of outstanding performance in visual arts, drama, music or a range of practical subjects.
The HSC is used for a far wider range of purposes than just university entry. In fact, only about one third of HSC students move immediately to university. For the remaining two-thirds, the HSC holds its own value as a measure of achievement. Most jobs open to school-leavers make the HSC a minimum requirement. The course reports accompanying the HSC show potential employers the applicant’s relative strengths.
In terms of the challenge facing our universities, all of this means that the data provided for each student in the HSC may offer another way to select students from their targeted groups.
Some universities already combine the ATAR with extra selection criteria for certain courses – interviews for medical degrees, portfolios for design degrees, bonus points for being a school captain and so on. The subject-by-subject data available in each student’s HSC is another, deeper way of informing the selection process.
The Bradley Review shows that as the worlds of work and study change and become more complex and interrelated, there will be increasing pressure to ensure that opportunities are distributed fairly and on merit.
Ranking measures won’t disappear, but their limitation in matching individual students to the right opportunities needs to be overcome. The HSC’s emphasis on breadth, flexibility and above all, thoroughness and reliability, will ensure that it continues to be recognised as one of the world’s great school credentials – and may yet be the answer to the universities’ current challenge.
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