Senior School Course Information

Senior School Options

From 2023, senior secondary education in Victoria has changed. The Victorian Certificate of Education as you know it remains the same, however, the VCE Vocational Major (VCE VM) is a new program within the VCE – it replaces Intermediate and Senior VCAL from pre-2023.

Students have the option of two key pathways: Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE), or the Victorian Certificate of Education Vocational Major (VCE VM). Each pathway is explained below.

VCE Program

There will be School Assessed Coursework and/or School Assessed Tasks (SAT) and Externally Assessed Tasks for each subject. In each unit there will be a combination of school assessed work and examinations that are assessed directly by the VCAA. Grades will be awarded on the scale A+, A, B+, B, C+, C, D+, D, E+, E, UG or NA. All marks and grades awarded by the school are conditional and may change as a result of statistical moderation conducted by the VCAA.

Calculating the ATAR

ATAR stands for Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank, so it is a rank – not a score. It is represented as a number between 0 and 99.95 in intervals of 0.05, with 99.95 being the highest rank.

As the ATAR is a rank, there is no pass or fail ATAR. Everyone who receives an ATAR has successfully passed the VCE. The ATAR simply demonstrates each student’s achievement in relation to all other students in the Year 12 age group. Someone receiving an ATAR of 55, for example, has performed better than 55 percent of the Year 12 age group that year.

Subjects aren’t scaled because of how ‘hard’ or how ‘easy’ we think they are. In reality, every subject is scaled in the same way: based on the strength of the competition in a particular year. VCE Study Scores are standardised rankings, or relative positions, reported on a scale between 0 and 50, with a middle ranking of 30. So, a student with a Study Score of 30 has performed better than half the students in that subject for that year. Scaling is applied to determine the difficulty in achieving the middle ranking – the median study score of 30 – in each subject.

Take Economics as an example. To scale this subject, VTAC looks at all of the students who took Economics this year and calculates the average of each of these students, across all of their other VCE studies. Where the average study score of a subject is above the mean (30), then the study is scaled up, because it shows that those students performed above average overall, meaning that there was higher competition in Economics – it was harder to get that middle score of 30. If Economics students performed below average in all of their other studies, then Economics would scale down, because that shows us that there was less competition in Economics this year.

An ATAR aggregate is calculated by adding:

• the scaled study score in any one of the English studies, plus

• the scaled study scores of the student’s next best three permissible studies, plus

• 10 per cent of the scaled study score for a fifth study (where available), plus

• 10 per cent of the scaled study score for a sixth study (where available).

Seek more detailed information about subjects via VCAA study guide

https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/curriculum/vce/vce-study-designs/Pages/vce-study-designs.aspx

Important Considerations about ATARs and Scaling

When choosing subjects for next year it is important that students do not choose to study particular subjects because they think doing those studies will help them get a higher ATAR. An ATAR represents a student’s performance across all of their studies and they are more likely to do well at subjects they enjoy.

It is also important that students do not choose to study a subject based on scaling. There is no point in a student selecting a study that they struggle with simply because it has traditionally been scaled up. Scaling is dependent on the performance of the students studying in a particular year. Therefore, it can change year to year.

Some subjects require a student to study the Unit 1 and Unit 2 sequence prior to undertaking the Unit 3 and Unit 4 sequence. This is strongly recommended by VCAA and the list of VCE subjects provides details on VCE subjects.

Some subjects are only available at the Unit 1 and Unit 2 level, therefore valuable for vocational purposes but not providing a pathway to a Unit 3 or Unit 4 sequence and consequent Study Score. Many Frankston High School students have already begun their VCE journey by undertaking a Unit 1 and Unit 2 sequence of a study whilst in Year 10.