What is ATAR scaling, actually?

The ATAR is a rank, not a mark. It tells universities the percentile position of a student in their Year-12 cohort. To produce a fair rank when students take different subjects, each state's tertiary admissions centre (TAC) scales raw subject marks so a strong performance in a hard subject counts more than a strong performance in an easier subject.

"Hard" here doesn't mean conceptually difficult — it means the candidature is academically strong. If most students who pick a subject are already high-achieving across all their courses, that subject's marks get scaled up. If most students who pick it underperform across their other courses, that subject's marks get scaled down. The mechanism is the same in every state. The reporting format differs.

Scaling is recalculated every year. Last year's pattern is not a guarantee for this year's. UAC says it explicitly: "if the quality of the candidature changes, the scaled mean will also change." Use prior-year data as a guide, not a promise.

The five-state landscape

State	Senior cert	Curriculum body	Admissions centre	2024 ATAR recipients	Per-subject detail published?
NSW	HSC	NESA	UAC	57,194	Full — mean, SD, max, P25–P99 for raw + scaled
VIC	VCE	VCAA	VTAC	—	Full — scaled mean, SD, scores at 20/25/30/35/40/45/50
QLD	QCE	QCAA	QTAC	28,845	Full — raw & scaled at P25/P50/P75/P90/P99
WA	WACE	SCSA	TISC	9,992	Summary only (course-level Maths means; no per-subject detail published by TISC)
SA / NT	SACE / NTCET	SACE Board	SATAC	—	Aggregate-to-ATAR table only (no per-subject scaling published by SATAC)

Sources: official tertiary admissions centre reports, 2024 cohort.

The 2024 top-scaling subjects (cross-state)

"Scaled mean" is the score the average student in a course received after scaling. A high scaled mean means the subject's candidature was strong; a low scaled mean does not mean the subject is "easier" — it usually means the candidature is more mixed. Note that the three states publish on different bases (NSW uses 50 max, VIC scales to 50 max, QLD uses 100 max), so the numbers below are not directly comparable across states.

VIC VCE top 5 (scaled mean / 50)

Subject	Scaled mean	Scaled SD
Latin	45.0	6.3
Specialist Mathematics	41.6	8.3
Chinese Second Language	40.6	6.5
Hebrew	40.5	6.9
French	40.1	6.5

NSW HSC top 5 by scaled mean (/ 50)

Course	Scaled mean	P90 scaled	P50 scaled
Mathematics Extension 2	43.4	47.9	44.7
Mathematics Extension 1	39.6	46.9	41.3
English Extension 1	36.2	43.3	36.9
English Extension 2	35.8	44.4	36.0
Music Extension	35.8	49.4	35.8

QLD QCE top 5 by scaled median (/ 100)

Subject	Scaled P50	Scaled P90
Specialist Mathematics	95.35	98.4
French	94.73	98.19
German	93.46	97.41
English and Literature Extension	91.49	95.5
Chemistry	90.45	96.83

The 2024 lowest-scaling subjects (VIC, by scaled mean)

These subjects scaled down in 2024 — the average study score of 30 mapped to a scaled score significantly below 30 in the VTAC aggregation process. Important context: a lower scaled mean doesn't make the subject the "wrong" choice. It usually reflects a wide candidature that includes both very strong and very weak students. Pick subjects you will engage with; do not pick on scaling alone.

Subject	Scaled mean	Study score 30 → scaled
Foundation Mathematics	21.3	20
Industry and Enterprise	22.1	21
Food Studies	24.1	23
Agricultural & Horticultural Studies	24.7	24
Product Design and Technologies	25.4	24