I just want to touch briefly on the concept of "wasting your ATAR", which is something that gets thrown around with some regularity at this time of year. Here are my thoughts on it.
The purpose of the ATAR.
The whole reason the ATAR exists is to give tertiary institutions an insight into academic performance of high school students. Unis and the like need some sort of way to "rank" high school students, particularly for courses in great demand.
Getting a 99 ATAR does not mean you're better than somebody who received a 50 ATAR. It also doesn't mean you'll perform better at university. It certainly doesn't mean you should only consider university courses that students who achieved similarly in high school are considering applying for. That would make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Getting a high ATAR doesn't mean you "need" to study Law, or Medicine. It just means you performed strongly within the confines of VCE/HSC assessments. Nothing more, nothing less.
So can you waste your ATAR?
I think the general idea here is that, say you achieved an ATAR of 90.00 and ended up enrolling in a course you could have been accepted into with a much lower ATAR - say, of 60.00. That's 30 whole wasted ATAR pointssss!11!!1!!!! But is it? Not really.
Enrolling in a degree just because you can makes no sense. Degrees with high ATAR requirements are not inherently prestigious. They're not inherently useful. They don't inherently guarantee jobs, or money. They're simply the degrees in greatest demand.
Imagine you're at the supermarket, and have $10.00 in your pocket. You want to buy some chocolate. You have two options:
Option 1: your favourite chocolate bar, which is conveniently quite cheap. You can buy this for $3.00.
Option 2: a much more expensive chocolate bar. One that is priced at $9.50, but one you don't think you'll enjoy nearly as much.
Would it be a waste to go for option one? No, obviously not. What if you had to throw away your change after buying the chocolate bar? Would it then be more sensible to go for option two? Still no. If you're going to spend $10.00 on a chocolate bar, why would you go for the "more prestigious" or more expensive one, solely because it was more expensive? That would make no sense at all. In fact, that would be wasting your money, because you ultimately don't get what you want. You're using your money to literally buy an inferior product.
The same is true with ATARs. Using your ATAR to get into a course you don't really want to get into just makes a mockery of everything you've been working toward.
I guess what I'm saying here is...
... for your own sake, please list your preferences in order of, y'know, preference. Nothing else. You're the one who'll be trudging through the degree. Don't forget that!
P.S. I enrolled in a degree with a minimum ATAR of like 15 points lower than my actual ATAR. Loved it. Zero regrets.
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