What’s the score on the ENTER?

On December 14, Alex Dyason’s life will change forever. That day she will receive her Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank (ENTER), which will determine if her dream of studying law will become a reality next year. But like many of Victoria’s 55,000 year 12 students, Alex has little faith in the state’s tertiary admissions system.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous that 13 years of schooling all comes down to a four-digit number,” she says.

The Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre will use a complex formula to calculate Alex’s ENTER. The difficulty of each of her subjects and the calibre of student she competed against will be factored into the equation.

VTAC says the system creates equity, yet recent studies show that the system favours the wealthy, and university admissions staff say inequities arise because the ENTER has become a status symbol.

Much of the confusion surrounding the ENTER relates to how study scores for different subjects are “scaled”. “The stereotypical view is that you need to do sciences and specialist maths in order to get a really high score,” says Alex. She suspects she is at a disadvantage because she chose mostly humanities subjects.

Such concerns are understandable, says Ian Dobson, whose research for Monash University indicates that students who do certain subjects tend to get higher ENTERs. (Last year, scores in specialist maths and some foreign language subjects were scaled to exceed the customary maximum of 50.)

Next year the ENTER will become the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) after all states and territories, except Queensland, decided to standardise ranking systems. This will have little effect on Victorian students as the ATAR will be calculated in the same way as the ENTER, so scaling remains central to the equation. According to VTAC, scaling is designed to level the playing field by factoring in the difficulty of the coursework and the strength of competition in each subject. “The purpose is to ensure that students are free to choose the subjects they enjoy and are good at,” says VTAC director Elaine Wenn.

But scaling does not affect students equally. Middle-range scores are adjusted the most. The closer a student’s score is to 50, the less it is scaled. In most subjects, top study scores are not scaled at all, meaning a student who blitzes an easier subject could be as well off as a student with the maximum score in a difficult subject, a fact Ms Wenn acknowledges.

As a VCE student last year, Scarlet Luk snubbed maths and science in favour of studying arts and humanities. She recalls being accused of choosing “bum subjects”, a slight she resents: “I worked damn hard for my marks … It wasn’t easy.”

Ms Luk insists that in choosing subjects, students should ignore the hype about scaling. “I was sorely tempted to do maths methods because it was scaled up and everyone else was doing it,” she says.

Ms Luk received an ENTER of 99.55. With exceptionally high marks across the board, her study scores were largely unaffected by scaling.

The problem with the ENTER is not so much the way it is calculated, says Emmaline Bexley from Melbourne University’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education, but the fact such emphasis is placed on it.

VTAC estimates about 75 per cent of year 12 students are selected for tertiary courses using their ENTER as the main criterion, but Dr Bexley says the ENTER is too blunt an instrument to accurately judge applicants, especially those with mid-range rankings - a view shared by VTAC.

“People who get a high ENTER usually do well at uni, but below the rank of 80.00 the ENTER is a very poor predictor,” she says.

Dr Bexley also says the system favours wealthier students, whose families can afford independent schools. Just 22 per cent of Victoria’s year 12 students attend private schools, yet VTAC figures show they account for half of those with ENTERs of more than 95.00.

Only 33 per cent of those ranked above 95.00 came from state schools, although more than half the state’s year 12s are enrolled in them.

Chris Crawford, a former student council president at Melbourne’s Wesley College, says private schools are geared towards producing high ENTERs rather than grooming successful university students.

“The guys in my university course who went to public schools were more self-driven. They weren’t as reliant on their teachers during year 12, which put them in good stead to succeed at uni,” Mr Crawford says.

Dr Dobson agrees. In 2005 he published a study indicating that students from public schools were, on average, of the same academic calibre as private school students with ENTERs five points higher.

This comes as cold comfort to Alex Dyason, who attends a state school in Melbourne’s north-east. She says an ENTER of 98.00 is needed to get into the course of her choice, but this will require her to outperform students from better-resourced private schools. One way to help level the playing field between private and state schools is to introduce standard admissions tests that assess generic thinking and reasoning skills underpinning success at university.

One such test is called “uniTEST”, developed by the Australian Council for Education Research in partnership with Cambridge Assessment in the UK. It is being trialled at four Australian universities, including the University of Ballarat. But even if the trials are successful, the test is more likely to be used at second-tier universities to assess applicants with mid-range ENTERs. Prestigious courses at elite institutions are likely to still rely on the ENTER.

Whatever its flaws, the ENTER has become a status symbol. Producing graduates with high ENTERs is one way some private schools justify fees of more than $20,000 a year. Scotch College’s promotional material, for example, boasts that more than half its VCE students achieve ENTERs above 90.00. But schools are not the only institutions using the ENTER as a status symbol, says Dr Bexley. “Universities tend to treat the ENTER score needed to get into their courses as a measure of quality, but in reality it has nothing to do with it,” she says. “The ENTER is merely a mechanism for sorting applicants.”

Every year, VTAC publishes “clearly-in” figures that provide a guide to the ENTER required to gain admittance into most courses. Many people treat this figure as an indicator of status - the higher the clearly-in, the better the course is assumed to be. The clearly-in has become a de facto star rating for university courses.

Universities can artificially inflate the clearly-in in various ways, such as reducing the number of places on offer or admitting more students through special access schemes. Another common method is to select smaller numbers of high-ranking year 12 students, filling remaining places with mature-aged applicants who do not have current ENTERs and therefore do not influence the clearly-in.

In some cases, admissions staff have been forced to select low-calibre mature-aged applicants at the expense of competent year 12 students, meaning prestige takes precedence over selection on merit. Such practices are an open secret among admissions staff.

“It’s expected that you increase or at least maintain the clearly-in from year to year. Everyone knows this but you won’t find it written down anywhere,” says an admissions officer from a large university, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity.

Another staff member says: “Everyone tells students that selections are made on merit, but they’re not … It’s all about maintaining prestige.”

According to VTAC statistics, Monash and Deakin universities allocated an overwhelming majority of offers to mature-aged students in particular courses last year. The director of Deakin University’s Higher Education Research, Professor Marcia Devlin, said this was due to high numbers of mature-aged applicants, yet she declined to supply figures to verify this. Professor Devlin said that the university’s selection policies were amongst the most equitable in the state, but she would neither confirm nor deny that selection officers were under pressure to keep clearly-in scores high.

A spokesperson from Monash University defended the equity of its admissions programs but did not answer questions relating to the use of selection practices to inflate clearly-in figures.

This is no surprise to Dr Dobson, who says universities used such tactics as far back as the 1980s. But for Alex Dyason, such news adds to her disillusionment with a system she perceives as unfair.

“After all this time and hard work it would be so incredibly disappointing if you knew you were good enough but they wouldn’t take you because they are protecting their prestige,” she says. “I’d be absolutely infuriated.”