There’s been a lot of discussion for some time now about demand driven university places and how they’re somehow bad, because it has led to a fall in ATARs and poor student completion rates.
Yeah right. The problem is not with demand driven places. The problem has always been with the ill-informed obsession with ATAR cut-offs, which almost no-one understands.
The ATAR number advertised for a particular course is not the mark required for entry to that course. It is a guide, usually the cut-off of the previous year, often rounded. Yes, some unis specify a minimum bar, but it’s actually a demand driven system. The more people that want to do a particular degree, the higher the ATAR cut-off for that particular degree.
So when the demand driven funding system freed supply of course places to theoretically unlimited, of course the ATARs demanded plummeted. Some courses can have fairly wild fluctuations: for example Paramedicine at Western Sydney is 83.75 this year and last year, was 93.8 in 2015, 85.05 in 2014
This is not a failure of the system, or a drop in standards as some have claimed. And as the system has stabilised to what universities can physically cope with, ATARs are not dropping considerably and intake is not increasing rapidly.
The community incorrectly places value on a degree by the ATAR score to get into it rather than the quality of education or likely outcome, and there are countless stories every year of parents pushing kids to do law or something because ‘they have the marks for it’ rather than it being what the student wants to do.
So why are the Government axing demand driven university? Because they’re hateful fools that want to dictate who goes to university and who doesn’t. Because they don’t want to invest in the future of this country.
The ATAR/UAC (and equivalent) application process has always been a flawed one. The idea that someone’s likelihood of success at university can be assessed by a number derived solely from a bunch of exams at the end of high school is a bit silly when you think about it. Would you hire someone for a job based solely on a test mark, without an application or interview?
Students who get in to university via early admission programs, where they are assessed on applications, grades, essays and recommendations have consistently higher marks and completion rates. Medicine students need to do an extra exam, write an application and go through a round of interviews in order to demonstrate their suitability to study medicine.
If the government’s concern is that they are paying for poor students who will never complete their degrees, then why are we not ditching the flawed ATAR system instead of demand driven places?
Because it’s a helluva lot of work to individually assess all those applications — which would need to be funded, and it would be harder for students to write applications to unis too. Who wants to do things the hard way?
As with all things, if you want to fix the problem, first you need to accurately identify the problem. Axing demand driven places will not stop people with high ATARs dropping out of university because they have signed up to the wrong degree and hate it.
End Rant.
Begin Rant: 