For your typical Year 12 student facing looming exams, imagining life beyond that magic Atar number has always been hard. Try doing it in a pandemic.
As HSC students in Sydney deal with the uncertain reality of studying in hard lockdown and in Victoria special consideration measures will be rolled out for VCE students, conversations have again surfaced about moving away from an emphasis on the Australian tertiary admissions rank.
But the need to rapidly reassess how students can and should be assessed is not only a consideration because of the fallout of lockdown – it’s also because the pandemic has very clearly highlighted the kind of skills students will need in the future, according to experts.
“For many years we’ve been saying, look, you need to go beyond academic content – you need to teach the basic general capabilities that they’re going to need to thrive in an uncertain world,” says Sandra Milligan, director and enterprise Prof at the assessment research centre at the Melbourne graduate school of education at Melbourne Uni.
“Being able to learn on your own without coaching from a teacher, being able to learn collaboratively with others, being able to communicate in various ways – Covid has brought home the fact that these kinds of skills are really, really important.”
Milligan says schools are realising they not only need to know how to teach and support these capabilities but: “They want to be able to assess them. And currently, they can’t.”
The emphasis placed on Atar scores has long dwarfed the number of students who actually rely on them to get into their university courses. Only 30% of first-year students are offered a university place based on their Atar; one study by the Mitchell Institute put it as low as 26%. The rest gain entry based on a range of pathways such as portfolios, academic history, aptitude tests, bridging courses, principals’ recommendations, interviews and being mature age.
Conversations around alternative pathways, and alternative – and more holistic – ways to value and assess learning, have been doing the rounds for years. But now Covid-19 has turbocharged those conversations.
Milligan’s New Metrics for Success program is working with more than 80 “first mover” schools to generate assessment tools, influence the development of policy and facilitate change. The program is one of many initiatives around the country established to rethink the way students are taught and assessed, including Big Picture Australia, which works with more 40 schools around Australia to create a highly personalised “graduation portfolio” which students can use to enter participating universities.
“There is increasing awareness, across the nation and across different jurisdictions, that the system of certification and assessment Australia used for senior secondary education is not providing the value for young people that it might and should. Nor is it delivering value for recruiters, selectors and employers,” says Bronwyn Lee of Learning Creates Australia, a national enterprise with a focus on better preparing young people for the future, including ways to assess success.
“How we define and measure success in learning is limiting too many young people’s ability to prepare for their future as current senior certificates and Atar provide only a partial reflection about who a young person is, what they know and what they can do.”
In the short term, just like last year, state governments and universities have come up with ways to reassure students and offer alternatives to Atar. This week the University of Western Sydney announced that it would accept year 11 results, as it has done in previous years. Last year Victorian students managed to sit their exams, despite the long July-October lockdown, but special consideration measures were put in place for every student, contributed to by their teachers, and NSW officials are now studying the work with interest. In mid 2020 Swinburne University announced it was doing away with the Atar entirely for many of its most popular undergraduate courses, including engineering and science, and it’s done it again for 2022.
Milligan, while applauding universities for quick responses, warns against entrenching short-term solutions: “Some of the other ways universities get students in are just not transparent enough, and could potentially become extremely unfair. Most kids don’t know about them. Then the fact remains, some of the things they’re doing like going directly to year 11 results is really undermining the school … and destructive of the work of school.”
Education policy consultant Megan O’Connell and co-author of the 2019 report Beyond Atar: a proposal for change says there has been not enough communication between universities and students about the alternatives: “It depends which university you’re looking at … It really is up to individual students to figure that out, and if you need to find out about it yourself it’s really hard.”
Some universities are piloting schemes in an attempt to embed long-lasting change. Verity Firth, executive director of social justice at UTS, is heading up a pilot program targeting students from low-socioeconomic partner schools in wouth-west Sydney who are not on a traditional trajectory to university. The UTS U@Uni Academy doesn’t rely on a single aggregated ranking,says Firth. “Instead we focus on non-traditional indicators of attainment to appraise students’ learning capabilities holistically.
“Our job is to predict academic potential and we want to do that in as fair a way as possible. Left to assessment through Atar alone, most of these students would not qualify to study at UTS. But our experience with similar cohorts demonstrates these students can be some of the most successful at university and in the workforce. The 21st century skills that the program nurtures and assesses throughout years 10-12 are proven to be robust predictors of student success.”
Firth believes the pandemic has dovetailed with the culmination of years of thinking in this space. “It’s all beginning to come together – the demand from schools, programs like Big Picture, the Shergold report … and I think the conversations prompted by Covid could potentially accelerate change.”
The challenge, Firth acknowledges, is how you scale these kinds of programs up, as well as ensuring that students are supported throughout their university years.
Andrew Norton, professor in the practice of higher education policy at the centre for social research and methods at the Australian National University, stresses there’s a need to ensure students are “not left to sink” with these alternative pathways: “My concern with alternative entry system is there’s not a lot of public evidence about the outcomes for the students who come in by this mechanism …”
At a policy level, South Australia will be the first state government to pilot learner profiles as an alternative to Atar in 2022, a key recommendation of a 2020 federal government report into secondary school pathways by Peter Shergold, chairman of the NSW Education Standards Authority and chancellor of Western Sydney University. Learner profiles are designed to help universities, Tafe, industry and employers form a more holistic view of a student’s capabilities, and are seen as an important equity measure. The federal education, employment and skills department is also undertaking analysis on a sample learner profile.
In the meantime, it’s students themselves, even beyond dealing with the immediate pressure of looming exams during a pandemic, who are pushing for change.
“There’s a bit of a groundswell by young people actually saying we don’t want to be measured as a number any more,” says O’Connell. “Young people from all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of schools are wanting to have their full experience of learning assessed. What they do in a school day isn’t everything they have to bring to the community, or everything they will bring through to university.”
The heated conversation in NSW, with suggestions to ditch exams entirely from some education heads, is mirroring the rhetoric in Victoria mid lockdown last year. There were calls to ditch the Atar, including a change.org petition signed by 25,000 people calling for all senior exams to be scrapped due to the pandemic.
But Milligan rejects the idea of completely rejecting the Atar. “Scholastic ability – which is what the Atar typically measures quite well – is important, of course. It’s just that it’s not sufficient any more. Even universities are seeing that a 99 Atar is not the best predictor of the person who’s going to invent the new vaccine, or the person who’s going to be the brilliant architect.”
Whether wholesale change on a big enough scale can be fast enough to serve the students of today remains to be seen. “Although,” says O’Connell, “one of the things that we’ve learnt from this pandemic is that you can change really big systems, really quickly, and I don’t think we ever would have thought that possible.”