What ATAR do I need?

So it has come down to the crunch time part of the year and everyone is worried about a combination of both exam stress and Uni selection hype. The connection between these two is that the exams will determine your ATAR and your ATAR will determine your university and that is cold hard fact. There are a lot of questions surrounding the ethics of selecting students for university degrees based a few numbers that are spit out of exams. Unfortunately, at the stage that most of you are at you don’t have the luxury to be questioning the system and will just have to do your best to play it to your advantage.
 
Every year VTAC will release a handbook outlining ATAR requirements for the purposes of your further education: this guidebook should be your bible. It will list a whole heap of not pre-requisite subjects and ATAR cut-offs for specific university courses. Using a combination of this guide, advice from your school and your own aspirations, you should be able to work out what course you want to do and the expectations that a given Uni has for entry into the course.
 
Cut-offs vary from university to university for the same degree. Generally Melbourne University will have the highest average cut-offs for the courses, however there are certainly specific degrees at Monash whose entry cut-offs are significantly higher (namely medicine and law). Therefore, it is important to not only consider the course you would like to do but the what institution you would like to do your degree at, as this will affect what ATAR you will need.
 
So far, this is all very open information provided by VTAC however there is a bit of hidden bad news among all the information published in the guide. What they publish for courses are ATAR cut-offs and in some cases they will publish “clearly in” marks. The Cut-offs are what you need to meet to be even considered for the spot but the “clearly in” marks will generally guarantee you a place in the course. The issue arises when the more competitive courses such as medicine and law don’t actually have a clearly in mark. This is because there are auxiliary examinations (UMAT) that will play a role in entry but more so that the ATAR cut-offs will vary with the quality of the applicants. In other words, if there is a lot of 99.00+ students applying then the “clearly in” mark may be higher than 99.00. These marks will change from year to year and will depend on the applicants and therefore are not often listed in the VTAC guide.
 
What to take away from this, especially for those aiming for the competitive degrees, is that there is no real roof in the potential ATAR you could need. Often it might even be better to not fall into the trap of looking at VTAC and getting complacent about the marks listed in the guide as these are liable to change. Always aim to do your best in your exams and your ATAR and don’t “settle for marks”.
 
Happy Studying.