The ATAR Notes Guide to Change of Preference

Making the transition from high school to university? Uni Notes can help!

Congratulations, VCE Class of 2015! You’ve studied hard all year, completed your exams, and now, after three well deserved weeks of rest and relaxation, the results which hopefully reflect your dedication and effort of the last 12+ months have arrived.

VTAC (the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre) will now go about processing the preferences you submitted a few months ago for the tertiary education courses you would like to apply for and enter in the 2016 academic year. Given that a significant amount of time has passed since you initially submitted those applications with VTAC you are this week able to change your tertiary entry preferences in case you feel differently about what you want to do.

You can do this by signing into your VTAC account using your ID number and PIN (the same details you use to access your VCE results online), clicking on the Course Preference List link which is located right there on the home page after you’ve signed in, and then simply playing around with the list of courses which appears before you. You can reorder the preferences you’ve previously submitted, as well as delete them and add new ones as you please. Once you’re done just hit submit.

Something that’s incredibly important to note is that the change of preferences window isn’t for panicking because your ATAR is lower than you’d expected and making wholesale changes because you’ve decided that you won’t get into your dream course anymore. Don’t remove a course that you really want to do – or shift it down your list – just because you think your ATAR isn’t high enough for it. The lowest ATAR score needed to get into each course changes each year and is based upon the number of people who apply for that course (against how many places are available) and how well they’ve done, so there’s no way to know if you’ve made the cutoff until offers are released. Keep your target courses up the top of the list and if you aren’t accepted for those you’ll simply receive an offer to the next one down the list which you’ve met the ATAR requirement for!

Unless you believe there’s a genuine chance that your ATAR isn’t sufficient for any of the 12 courses you initially preferenced (and I’d recommend getting advice from careers counsellors, older students, and tertiary institutions before deciding this), you shouldn’t be changing preferences as a reaction to your results. You can’t waste your preferences, that’s what you’ve been given 12 for! Changing preferences is really about reflecting upon the last few months of your VCE and ensuring that you’ve chosen the courses you really want to study. Your exam experiences might have reinforced your passion and interest in different fields, or you might have decided that your skills lie elsewhere to what you’d initially thought. Take the time to think about what you want to get out of higher education now that you have your results and you’re no longer wrapped up in the high school bubble.

A quick recap of the guidelines for selecting your preferences:

Admissions offices at universities don’t know the order of your preferences, only your ID and your ATAR (and other testing where relevant). So that’s all they’ll take into account.
You can get accepted to multiple courses if your ATAR meets the requirements of more than one of your 12 preferences, but you’ll only receive an offer for one of them that you’ll be able to accept. That one obviously will be the course you’ve given highest preference to, not the course with the highest ATAR requirement.
As such DO NOT order your preferences based upon how likely you think you are to be accepted to those courses. Order them based upon how much you want to do them from 1 to 12. VTAC will sort out that first bit out for you. Ignoring this advice is a great way to miss out on the course you really wanted to do when your ATAR was good enough to get you in.
Requirements (including closing dates) are different for each course. Make sure that the closing date for courses you want to preference hasn’t passed already. If they have and they aren’t in your list you won’t be able to add them. If they are in your list and you remove them you won’t be able to put them back so make sure you’re sure (and use the up and down arrows if you want to reorder them).

All applicants for the mainstream undergraduate entry for 2016 courses (so excluding early offers) have until noon of Monday December 21st 2015 to change their preferences. That is 12pm on the Monday after VCE results are released!

Change of preferences reopen on Monday January 4th 2016 briefly from 10am to 4pm in case you need to update them then (and to accommodate IB applicants).

Good luck!