Policy & ReformTop StoriesVET & TAFE
Scrap ATAR and rethink career pathways: Experts call for overhaul
A new report is proposing a rethink on how educators approach senior schooling and tertiary education, and calls for the ATAR to be replaced with a more comprehensive “learning profile”.
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Whilst i strongly support the notion that the ATAR serves no stakeholders very weill, replacing it with a Learning Profile or similar, comes with a few problems as well. The decision as to who will likely succeed at university will take longer to determine with added costs and time for the admission processes. Once at university new students will struggle when faced with exams that mean progression or not to the next semester. And before you say there are better ways to ensure students have met the Learning Outcomes of the subject than exams, I agree there are! But they take quite a bit of time and therefore the cost of assessment becomes prohibitive. At the university I work at we have only 2 hours of marking per student per subject allocated. This is not much if you have several assessment tasks so students have different ways to demonstrate their knowledge. It will be really difficult to find a better means of assessment for university that is sustainable, although we are tinkering around the with a few different pathways. Many students don’t go on to university or other higher education though, so there are two separate problems. How to assist universities and education organisations in selecting students and what is the best method of preparing the other students for the workforce and enabling employers to determine their fitness for employment.
I guess under-paid school teachers will be now required to collect/complete/generate this “rich data set”, for the “Learning Profile”. How much time and training it is going to take? Does it mean that all current teachers are going to be trained for this new way of evaluation? What is the cost? Did you want to save money? It does not look so… Students with low ATAR are falling out of universities and you think that “Learning Profile’ is going to help those students to study better? It will help our children to get in Uni, but what is next? How it is going to help them to get through? I understand that it is necessary to do something to improve the situation, however I am afraid that cancellation of the exams at high school is not the way to go. So, it is suggested that it will be a “living document, enabling young people to chart their learning and development”. Do you actually mean that skills and knowledge are not going to be evaluated by teachers? By kids themselves? This approach is going to give our kids “pink” glasses ( the least harmful scenario?). It is not going to prepare children for future life where they are expected to be confident, resilient etc … The whole thing sounds very dangerous…