Six years of high schooling comes to an end with that magic number. The whole experience passes you by in a flash, and now those four digits will dictate the rest of your education and indeed your life.
Or will they? It’s well-known that the education system isn’t the best suited to catering to the wider population. At least from a VCE perspective, the benefits you gain from high school are the skills needed to balance several commitments at once and the corresponding work ethic needed. But these are skills we naturally develop throughout our life; indeed, any environment that forces you to juggle multiple responsibilities (for example, a job) will teach you how necessary these are.
So, does your ATAR actually count for anything? Well, it’s partially representative of your efforts and how hard you worked through the year. A high ATAR is pretty good indication of both having the smarts and the focus to do well. But again, the VCE scaling system ensures that if your skills do not lie in the “meta” subjects, your chances of a “good” ATAR immediately diminish. Someone who put their all into mastering Revolutions or Global Politics might see a worse result than an individual who didn’t try quite as hard in Specialist Maths. Of course, the difficulty of subjects is reflected in the scaling – but it is this scaling that so often masks the talents of thousands of bright students.
There are some courses that open their doors to only high achievers straight out of high school. Physiotherapy, Law, Medicine – these are chief among the courses that demand only the highest of ATARs. But we often fall victim to tunnel vision, focusing on one path and one path only. So what if your ATAR means you don’t get into Law on your first try? Try another course, then apply to transfer after a few months. So many people are burnt out by Year 12 that the course they dreamed of doing for years and months turns out to be nowhere near what they wanted to do at all. Your ATAR should not and indeed does not dictate your tertiary education – only you can control that.
Seeing that number pop up on your screen will lead to joy, sadness, satisfaction, anger and everything in-between. No matter your score, you should be proud of your hard work and look forward to a new chapter and a new beginning. Your ATAR is indeed important; but it will never define your effort or your talent as a student.
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