How the QCE ATAR is calculated

The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank is a position, not a mark. An ATAR of 85.00 means you are ranked in the top 15% of your age group, including students who left school early or did not seek an ATAR. It runs from 99.95 down to 30.00 in steps of 0.05; anything lower is reported as "30 or below".

Because it is a rank, the ATAR is calculated once for the whole cohort after results are final. Nobody can know their ATAR before QTAC releases it, which is why every calculator, including ours, is an estimate.

Only Units 3 and 4 results count. Year 11 (Units 1 and 2) contributes nothing to the ATAR, although it matters for the QCE and for keeping your options open.

QTAC uses your best five results, chosen under these rules:

• At least four of the five must be General subjects (the ones assessed out of 100 with an external exam).
• The fifth can be another General subject, one Applied subject, or one completed VET qualification at Certificate III or above.
• Essential English cannot count alongside General English, and Essential Mathematics cannot count alongside General Mathematics or Mathematical Methods.
• A sixth or seventh subject adds nothing on its own. It only helps if it beats one of your existing five and takes its place.

To receive an ATAR you must achieve a sound result (a C or better) in one of English, Essential English, Literature, English and Literature Extension, or English as an Additional Language. That English result does not have to be one of your best five. It just has to exist.

A 78 in Physics and a 78 in Drama are not the same achievement relative to the students who chose each subject, so QTAC scales every subject onto a common 0 to 100 scale before adding anything up. The scaling is worked out fresh each year from the actual cohort using an iterative, cohort-wide algorithm: a subject taken by students who also do well elsewhere tends to scale up, and vice versa.

Scaling is not a reward for "hard" subjects and it is not a fixed bonus. It only adjusts for who sat the subject. Picking a subject because it scaled up last year is a poor strategy: a strong raw result in a subject you are good at almost always beats a weak result in one that scales well.

QTAC publishes a percentile-based scaling summary for each subject in its annual ATAR Report. Our calculator uses those published anchors, which is why it can only ever be an estimate of the following year.

Your five scaled results are added together to give the Tertiary Entrance Aggregate, or TEA, out of 500. The TEA is what QTAC ranks. Every student with the same TEA receives the same ATAR.

QTAC then converts each TEA to an ATAR by rank against the whole age cohort. The conversion table changes every year with the cohort, so a TEA of 400 does not map to a fixed ATAR.

Suppose a student expects English 82, Mathematical Methods 75, Chemistry 70, Biology 79, Legal Studies 84 and Certificate III in Business (completed).

1. Each General result is scaled. Say they become 84, 84, 79, 78 and 82.
2. The Certificate III is scaled as an Applied or VET result; say it scales to 60.
3. The best five under the rules are the five General subjects (four or more must be General, and the VET result is the lowest anyway).
4. TEA = 84 + 84 + 79 + 78 + 82 = 407.
5. QTAC looks up 407 in that year's TEA-to-ATAR table. In recent years a TEA in the low 400s has landed in the low-to-mid 80s.

• Your weakest counting subject is the lever. Lifting a 70 to a 78 is worth more than lifting an 88 to a 92, because both count equally in the TEA.
• The external exam is a large slice of each General subject (25% or 50% depending on the subject), and it is the one assessment you can still change late in the year. Past papers are the highest-value revision there is.
• Do not drop to five subjects early. A sixth gives you a fallback if one result disappoints.