There is also evidence that most courses that made offers to students through the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre (VTAC) this year did not publish ATARs for those courses at all. Yes, that's right, most courses. Then there's the evidence that of those that did publish an ATAR for a course, two-thirds of those courses made more than 30 per cent of their offers at lower ATARs than the published figure. It makes one begin to wonder about the point of the ATAR. The ATAR was more important when the supply of university places was limited and demand for these exceeded supply. Cut-offs were a useful strategy for allocating too few places. In our current demand-driven system of university places, where there are few limits on the number of students a university can enrol, the ATAR is used primarily as a marketing tool. What is frustrating about that is that such use creates unnecessary misinformation and genuine hurt and suffering to many students and their families.

Students with ATARs below the published ones for courses they are interested in often feel shame, inferiority to other students and less worthy of receiving further education. It would not be accurate or fair to take away from those students who receive high ATARs – and no one is interested in doing so – but an ATAR rank is not in itself a measure of intelligence, motivation, diligence, aptitude or ability. We have evidence that the ATAR rank a student receives is closely correlated with their socioeconomic status. To put it simply and generally, the higher the socioeconomic status and capital, the higher the ATAR is likely to be, and vice versa. What we should be focused on as a society is what happens to students, regardless of their entry method, during their university study and after graduation. Many students who have very high ATARs come unstuck at university when the intensive support and guidance to which they have become accustomed falls away. All university students should have the best possible start, experience and outcomes we can provide. Tim Pitman, a senior research fellow from the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education, says Australian universities are meant to educate people and create a quality output, not validate a quality input.

If we strangle supply of university places, he added, ATARs would skyrocket and we could claim we had the highest quality universities in the world. We could also exclude many more students from contributing to national economic growth, innovation and social cohesion through being university educated. In our current system, the ATAR is increasingly a mechanism for universities to provide an uninformed audience with poor proxies for the quality of courses and institutions. Shame on us for continuing to perpetuate this nonsense. Marcia Devlin is deputy vice-chancellor (Learning and Quality) at Federation University Australia. m.devlin@federation.edu.au