Queensland students about to start year 12 will be the final graduating class to receive an OP score, from 1 to 25, for university admissions.
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From next year, Queensland’s secondary school students will join the rest of the country in receiving Australian Tertiary Admissions Ranks.
Instead of an OP score of between 1 and 25, the ATAR is a 100-point grade expressed on a scale from "30.00 or less" to 99.95 in increments of 0.05.
Queensland Education Minister Grace Grace said experts had already compared OP scores and the new ATAR scheme.
“For example, a student who would be eligible for an OP1 would potentially receive an ATAR of between 98.85 and 99.95,” Ms Grace said.
“An OP10 is roughly equivalent to an ATAR of 78.00.”
ATAR ratings below 30 will be reported as "30.00 or less".
Griffith University academic registrar Kathy Grgic said the move meant Queensland’s year 12 students would be looked at "in a more equitable way” when they applied for courses interstate.
“That is one of the advantages for universities because where we have quite high-demand courses it allows us to put applicants in a much finer-grained order of merit,” she said.
“It is a lot more helpful than the OP, which is much broader-reading [and] had a lot of students clumping on particular numbers and it was a lot harder to develop a consistent order of merit.”
Ms Grgic said Queensland’s OP score meant the state had, for almost three decades, been seen as “the outlier”.
She said the national ATAR scheme was a big improvement for secondary students, despite additional exams.
“That has advantages for mobility of students between states and obviously makes it easier for universities to compare results across borders,” she said.
“They are more competitive in having a measure that is the same as the rest of Australia.”
Queensland adopted the Overall Position (OP) score system in 1992. From 2020, year 12 students will sit external exams and receive an ATAR rating.
Ms Grace said the switch to the ATAR system involved this year’s year 11 students as well.
“Students in year 11 this year will probably be making subject choices that will be impacting them when they enter the ATAR scheme in 2020,” she said.
“So we have made sure that those students – and their parents and school communities - are very well versed in how the new ATAR system will work.”
The decision to move towards the ATAR ranking was made in 2015, after the Australian Council for Educational Research reviewed the Queensland scheme.
In 2016, the Queensland government decided to delay the introduction of the ATAR scheme from 2019 until 2020.
Ms Grace said the OP score system had served Queensland well but the state was “out of step with the rest of Australia”.
Year 12 students in 2019 will still have to sit the Queensland Core Skills test. It will then be abolished.
