The ATAR or Australian Tertiary Admission Rank is a ranking of all individuals in the country in their final year of any given certificate. It is derived from an aggregate mark awarded to you as a result of your performance in your subjects and denotes your “rank” compared to others. As such, if you were to be awarded an ATAR of 85 it would mean you have performed better than 85% of your peers whilst 15% of your peers performed better than you. There are a number of other features that contribute to determining ATAR; this includes scaling of certain subjects and bonus aggregate points awarded for certain subjects but ranking according to grade is the crux of it.
What the ATAR is used for is determining who earns positions in courses at different universities. Each course at a given university provides an entry ATAR as a guide, usually derived from the lowest ATAR to earn a place in the course the previous year. This is because universities do not have the resources to accept everyone into a course. What this means is that entry ATARs reflect the popularity of the course, as higher ATARS will be taken preferentially to lower ATARs, except in the case of courses that require auditions such as music or portfolios such as fine arts. Therefore more popular courses will be filled with higher ATARs than less popular courses and so have higher ‘guide’ ATARs. This point bears repeating: the guide ATARs are indicative of the
popularity of the course,
not the difficulty. You therefore have nothing to lose by applying for a course you want to do despite a seemingly intimidating guide ATAR.
What this naturally means though, is that you want to maximise your ATAR as much as possible. This is because with a higher ATAR you have more options at your disposal in terms of courses you can apply for.
Generally speaking you can expect higher ATAR requirements for courses that offer safe, well defined, often well-paid career pathways as these are generally very popular. These are typically the professions such as engineering, law and medicine. On the other hand, courses with less well defined career paths often have lower ATARs as they often prove less popular. These will be courses such as the arts, sciences and business. It may very well be that a fiendishly difficult mathematics course could possibly have a very low ‘guide’ ATAR, whilst something simpler like medicine may have a very high one.
These ‘guide’ ATARs for a given course will also be different depending on the University. These ATAR can also be considered an indirect measure of the quality of a course at a given university, as one reason a course at a university may be popular is because it is taught well. The table below illustrates this point.
The University of Adelaide:
| The University of Adelaide |
| Course |
‘Guide’ ATAR’ |
| Bachelor of Medicine/ Bachelor of Surgery |
90 |
| Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) |
82.9 |
| Bachelor of Laws |
95 |
| Bachelor of Science |
65 |
| Bachelor of Arts |
65.1 |
| Bachelor of Commerce |
80.05 |
Monash University:
| Monash University |
| Course |
‘Guide’ ATAR’ |
| Bachelor of Medical Science / Doctor of Medicine |
94 |
| Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) |
91.1 |
| Bachelor of Laws |
94 |
| Bachelor of Science |
75 |
| Bachelor of Arts |
75 |
| Bachelor of Commerce |
86 |
