A testing time: VCE students owe much to their schools. Credit:Rob Young

However, scored selection is far from equitable. ATAR parades as the mark of an individual's gifts and hard work. But students owe much to their schools. The greater the academic training, individual support and organisation, the higher the ATAR. Students attending well-resourced, mainly private schools have an advantage in their access to "hard options", marks and ATARs. Academic training in the practice of different school subjects is the key. Private school students, on average, have higher ATARs and therefore muscle out the competition. The search for the best and brightest thus ends up finding an abundance of well-heeled representatives. Very few of the meritorious poor — about six in 100 — make up the elite in the elite universities.

Is it mere vanity that drives universities to prefer students most likely to succeed? Why would a teaching institution of high calibre be so wedded to predicting success when its mission in life is to produce success? Schools are expected to produce success. But young people arrive at university unequally prepared. They are greeted by academics unequally prepared to deal with them. These expect schools to have done their work for them so they can get on with research. By enrolling only students with a high prediction of success, they can focus on the research league ladder. Predicting success relies on what schools do: producing success relies on what universities do. Which is better?

Firstly, the best and brightest are not necessarily the intellectual adventurers who climb Law Quad walls (as in Melbourne's recent publicity). ATAR aristocrats are highly trained students. This does not make them geniuses. They are the survivors of academic practice in the drill hall of the VCE. They know how to manage the dull lecture, the obscure lecturer, the dud course, they ransack past papers, exchange notes, write assignments together. How they got their marks is far from a roll of the genetic dice.

Universities inflate scores in upmarket subjects and deflate them in downmarket ones. Since there is no intrinsic measure of the relative difficulty of subjects, universities upscale what strong students do and downscale what the weak do. Students should indeed be rewarded for tackling difficult subjects. But the difficulty of a subject is relative to the intensity of support available to manage it. ATAR ignores the input of schools. Scores for all students doing Chemistry or French are upscaled, regardless of whether students attend a small country school, a severely disadvantaged high school, or a wealthy private school that caps VCE classes at 15 and gives every Year 7 class two teachers. How is this picking the best and brightest?