No more OP scores as state adopts ATAR

HIGH school graduates will soon no longer receive an OP score on completion of their final year as Queensland aligns with the rest of the nation.

From next year, Year 12 students will be given an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank in place of the Overall Position.

The new scheme will make it easier for tertiary education facilities to manage their intake. The ATAR, introduced nationally in 2009, is a number between 0 and 99.95, with scores given in increments of 0.05. ATARs below 30 are not reported.

The scores will be calculated using similar measures to the OP, however many education leaders and academics have argued the ATAR is a more precise model as it has a fine-grained score.

Students will have to sit external examinations for each subject in Term 4 of Year 12 as opposed to the Queensland Core Skills test.

Until now, Queensland has been the only state in Australia that does not provide students with an ATAR.

In a piece on academics website Conversation, Southern Cross University Vice Chancellor Adam Shoemaker argued the new system would assist interstate movements school-leavers.

“If every other state and territory in the nation has adopted an ATAR as a measure of tertiary entrance, it is just not fair to interstate migrants to put a different hurdle in their path,” Prof Shoemaker wrote in 2014. the of