The QTAC report telling all about how the 2025 ATAR was calculated has just come out. So where is it?
Answer? Here.
What does this report tell you?
A lot of different things, including:
- How many students studied each of the different senior subjects last year
- How inter-subject scaling was performed (for more detail, check out QTAC’s Inter-Subject Scaling White Paper)
- How each subject’s raw and scaled scores varied at the 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th and 99th percentiles.
- How many students were ATAR eligible and what combinations of subjects were used to calculate ATARs last year (e.g. about 70% of ATAR-eligible students had their ATAR calculated off 5 General subjects)
- How ATARs were roughly distributed across the 2000 possible ATAR bands (00.00>99.95) – it’s probably not surprising to see that about 92% of all ATARs were above 50.00 – and how many students got each of the top 40 ATAR bands (98.00-99.95). Spoiler: about 37 in each band, which means my video about how the ATAR works is still pretty accurate!
- We also got to see how the number of students per ATAR band actually drops off as the ATARs get lower. Not that surprising, given the ATAR calculation considers “the entire potential Year 12 cohort population” (p. 16), which includes Year 12 students who were ATAR-ineligible.