To receive a VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education), you need to satisfactorily complete 16 units of study including a) 3 units of English with at least one at unit 3 or 4 level; b) 3 sequences of units 3 & 4 in studies other than English.
Unit 1 & 2 are only categorised as "S - Satisfactory" and "N - Not Satisfactory". In addition to "S" and "N", unit 3 & 4 sequences also have grades and study scores. Each unit 3 & 4 sequence has 3 graded assessments: 1 or 2 for school based assessment and at least 1 for an external exam. Some Art and Technology studies have School-Assessed Tasks (SAT). A study score is based on your grades, see VCE study score and Median VCE study score. Since all grades cover a range of scores, the same letter grade might result in a different study score.
VCAA reports study scores, ie. raw scores. The student's study scores are sent to VTAC. The raw scores will be scaled up or down by VTAC based on the difficulty to achieve a high score on the particular subject. Once they have been scaled, they are referred to as VTAC Scaled Study Scores. See VCE Study Scores Scaling for details.
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An Aggregate is calculated by adding:
• A student's best VTAC Scaled Study Score in any one of the English studies; plus,
• The VTAC Scaled Study Scores of their next best three permissible studies (which together with the English study make the "Primary Four"); plus,
• 10 per cent of the VTAC Scaled Study Score for a fifth study (where available; this is called an increment); plus,
• 10 per cent of the VTAC Scaled Study Score for a sixth study (where available; this is called an increment).
The fifth and sixth studies are optional. If a student has a Primary Four, they will get an ATAR. If a student has more than 6 results, VTAC will use the six permissible scores that give the highest ATAR.
Study combination restrictions
In each of the following study areas: languages, English, maths, history, information technology, music and contemporary Australian studies,
1. at most two results can contribute to the Primary Four;
2. at most three results can contribute to your ATAR, the 3rd being counted as a 10% increment for a 5th or 6th study. This also includes higher education studies, see below.
As shown on VCE ATAR Calculator, an higher education study can be included as an increment in the ATAR (5th or 6th study, but not both) after Primary Four. An example of the extension study is University Maths.
The Scores contributing to the Aggregate are subject to the study restrictions described above.
The Aggregate is a number between 0 and a value over 210 (4x50, 4 perfect scores, primary 4). With the scaling up and / or incremental, your aggregate can be higher than 210.
All eligible students are then ranked in order of their Aggregate, and a percentage rank is assigned to distribute students as evenly as possible over a 100 point scale. All students with the same Aggregate receive the same percentage rank. If a number of students are tied on a particular Aggregate the number that receives the corresponding percentage rank may increase.
Finally, the percentage rank is converted to an ATAR, which is the estimate of the percentage of the population in the relevant age group that the student outperformed, taking into account the students who have successfully completed VCE as well as those who moved or left school before Year 12.
The ATAR is a number from 0 and 99.95 in intervals of 0.05. The highest rank is 99.95, the next highest 99.90, and so on. The lowest automatically reported rank is 30.00, with ranks below 30.00 being reported as "less than 30".
Related:
Better Education VCE ATAR Calculator
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VCE study score and Median VCE study score
VCE Study Scores Scaling
