Over at Catallaxy, Judy Sloan is having a go at low ATAR university courses.
I just want to have the bridges identified which are designed by civil engineers with cut-off points of 62.
And I also noticed that the cut off score for entry into Primary Education courses is in the 50s – pity the poor children in a few years time.
As Judy hints at, ATAR (or its predecessors: ENTER, UAI, TER) is only moderately predictive of future academic performance, and even then only for higher ATAR students. This overview paper on Victorian university selection practices summarised some of the research:
Their … work at Monash confirmed the correlation between high ENTER and strong university performance (r=0.38 for ENTER over 80). Importantly, however, they found little correlation between ENTER and university performance for low to middle ENTER bands (r=0.04 for ENTER below 80). This finding supports that of Murphy et al. (2001), who found in their study of RMIT students that the strongest correlations between ENTER and university performance were at ENTERs above 80, with no correlation between 40 and 80 and variable correlation below 40.
Andrew Norton 