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March 28, 2024, 10:13:37 pm

Author Topic: Regretting my choice of subjects... Is an ATAR of 90+ still achievable?  (Read 4477 times)

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Eyrie

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I'm starting Year 12 next year with only 5 subjects (Maths Methods, General English, Biology, Chemistry and Visual Art). When selecting senior subjects I refrained from doing Physics as well seems as I was trying to enroll in an English extension at a different school of distance education. The school wouldn't allow me to study just one subject with them and my school doesn't offer it, so by then I was stuck with doing 5 subjects in Year 11.

I assume that there's nothing I can do to change or add subjects now that I'm going into Year 12, so how will this affect my ATAR? My sibling graduated with an ATAR of 99.95 but she took Maths C on top of the five I'm doing, and Physics instead of Bio. I'm really starting to regret not doing a sixth subject at the start of the year as mine aren't particularly high scaling anyway.

The Cat In The Hat

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Re: Regretting my choice of subjects... Is an ATAR of 90+ still achievable?
« Reply #1 on: September 03, 2020, 10:32:39 am »
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I'm starting Year 12 next year with only 5 subjects (Maths Methods, General English, Biology, Chemistry and Visual Art). When selecting senior subjects I refrained from doing Physics as well seems as I was trying to enroll in an English extension at a different school of distance education. The school wouldn't allow me to study just one subject with them and my school doesn't offer it, so by then I was stuck with doing 5 subjects in Year 11.

I assume that there's nothing I can do to change or add subjects now that I'm going into Year 12, so how will this affect my ATAR? My sibling graduated with an ATAR of 99.95 but she took Maths C on top of the five I'm doing, and Physics instead of Bio. I'm really starting to regret not doing a sixth subject at the start of the year as mine aren't particularly high scaling anyway.
Note- I'm a VCE student, this may not all apply.
I'm doing 5 subjects (one of which I did accelerated). I expect to get 90+ ATAR (I could be wrong, but still).
heids did 5 subjects. I can't recall what she got exactly but it was definitely 90+. It's certainly achievable!
Can you not pick up a subject in year 12?? It may be harder, and you'd probably want to ask for advice as to which subjects to steer clear from, but I think that's a way to do it - you could study over the summer to make sure you really know stuff.
Scaling isn't as important as people make it out to be - by the time you get to the top end (which you'd want to get a 90+ ATAR) it isn't as different between raw and scaled.
I don't know about QCE, whether it's exactly the same as VCE or not, but at least for VCE, the 5th and 6th subject you only get 10% of the score into your ATAR - so, for instance, if we assume my HHD score was what I get (it's raw 31) and my subjects this year are top 4, I'd only get 3.1 points out of HHD (don't ask how the scoring later works, IDK). For your sixth subject, therefore, the maximum you can add to your aggregate is 5 points.

Mainly, I'd say, though, don't worry about it - just do your best!
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Re: Regretting my choice of subjects... Is an ATAR of 90+ still achievable?
« Reply #2 on: September 03, 2020, 11:13:08 am »
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Like The Cat In The Hat I'm also a VCE student, but you can see a lot of 99+ atars with 5 subjects so don't worry about scaling. Scaling is there to even things out, not give easier subjects a disadvantage. If you put the hard/smart work in you will definitely get the atar of your dreams  ;D
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Joseph41

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Re: Regretting my choice of subjects... Is an ATAR of 90+ still achievable?
« Reply #3 on: September 04, 2020, 03:01:28 pm »
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Hey Eyrie! Welcome to ATAR Notes - it's great to have you here. Looking forward to seeing you around. :) I'll respond to sections of your post below:

I'm starting Year 12 next year

Nice! How are you feeling about it generally?

Quote
with only 5 subjects (Maths Methods, General English, Biology, Chemistry and Visual Art). When selecting senior subjects I refrained from doing Physics as well seems as I was trying to enroll in an English extension at a different school of distance education. The school wouldn't allow me to study just one subject with them and my school doesn't offer it, so by then I was stuck with doing 5 subjects in Year 11.

I assume that there's nothing I can do to change or add subjects now that I'm going into Year 12,

It will be best to speak to your school about this - do you have a senior years coordinator or careers counsellor available to speak to?

Quote
so how will this affect my ATAR? My sibling graduated with an ATAR of 99.95 but she took Maths C on top of the five I'm doing, and Physics instead of Bio. I'm really starting to regret not doing a sixth subject at the start of the year as mine aren't particularly high scaling anyway.

Did your sibling graduate under the OP system? If so, I imagine the ATAR quoted above was based on an OP to ATAR conversion. They're very different systems and are calculated quite differently.

In Queensland, the ATAR is derived from your best five subjects. You can read more about how it's calculated in these threads if you're interested:

What is the ATAR?
How is the ATAR calculated?
How does inter-subject scaling work?

I think the third thread there - the one on scaling - is important. It's impossible to say at this stage how your subjects - or any subjects - will scale this year, or what impact that will have. But no matter what scaling ultimately looks like for each subject, that scaling is in place for a reason. It's not designed to reward or punish you for studying (or not studying) certain subjects, but to negate other factors (such as competitiveness of a subject), which would otherwise make QCE an uneven playing field.

To answer your question in the thread title, a 90+ ATAR with five subjects, and with your five subjects specifically, is 100% possible. :)

I don't know about QCE, whether it's exactly the same as VCE or not, but at least for VCE, the 5th and 6th subject you only get 10% of the score into your ATAR - so, for instance, if we assume my HHD score was what I get (it's raw 31) and my subjects this year are top 4, I'd only get 3.1 points out of HHD (don't ask how the scoring later works, IDK). For your sixth subject, therefore, the maximum you can add to your aggregate is 5 points.

This is not the case for students in Queensland, and there are a number of differences between the systems and how the ATAR is calculated (for example, subject scores for QCE are out of 100, and there is no concept of a "top four").

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