Here’s Why Tasmanian Students Are Furious About ATAR Exam Results Update

Suddenly, many Tasmanian students are shocked by the scores they received. To make a long story short, young people noticed that maximum scores for one subject plummeted by 30% from the previous year. And they have no idea why it happened! Today, the Typical Student team will tell you more about it!

ATAR

To start with, ATAR comes for Australian Tertiary Entrance Rank. Recently, Tasmanian students received updated ATAR after that were shown after an 'error' resulted in a steep drop in exam scores. In fact, a bit earlier students already saw their real scores and now everyone is shocked by what happened to their results.

As stated by numerous students, Tasmania's highest-achieving year 12 students were affected after maximum scores for one subject plummeted by 30% from the previous year, reducing their uni entrance scores.

The Reaction

What happened next? Well, shocked students were told to ignore these scores. Finally, one of the students received ATAR statement. According to it, there was a "procedural error" found in the scoring of some units offered to Tasmanian students. It was a part of the University of Tasmania High Achiever Program (HAP) and University Connections Program (UCP) units.

Here is what the statement said:

"The changes to Tertiary Entrance Scores for this group of students has required us to recalculate the Australian Tertiary Entrance Rank (ATAR) for all students in the 2018 cohort.

"The error was identified prior to the University of Tasmania finalizing its selection processes for tertiary courses and scholarships.

"The University has been supplied with the revised ATAR and subject data, and selection processes will be restarted using the new data.

"The transfer of data to interstate Tertiary Admissions Centres was not scheduled to occur until late Tuesday evening, and as such, this transfer has not been impacted by the error.

"The correct ATAR scores and subjects will be transferred on Wednesday 19 December.

"Students should ignore results previously received."

Jeremy Rockliff

“I understand this error will have been upsetting for some students and I’d like to reassure them that their tertiary admissions will not be impacted. I have instructed the secretary of the Department of Education to initiate an independent audit to understand how Atar scores were incorrectly calculated in order to prevent such an incident happening again,” said Jeremy Rockliff, the state’s education minister.

He ordered an audit which should determine the way the ATAR scores were calculated. Although the Office of Tasmanian Assessment, Standards and Certification and the University of Tasmania have already tested and validated the updated results multiple times, students are still not happy with them.
For today, the issue is fixed. Officials say they found many errors in the scoring of some subjects.

“We were all shocked and pretty emotionally distraught over it,” Yasmine Wright Gittins said. “A lot of people were quite reliant on the marks they needed to receive from that subject.”