THERE are some very happy and very relieved Year 12 graduates in the Gunnedah area today, after some pleasant ATAR surprises this morning.
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The Australian Tertiary Admission Rank popped up on apps and websites at 9am, and three students the NVI contacted had great news to share.
Local residents Maja Heath of Calrossy Anglican School Tamworth, and Eliza Perkins and Emmerson Tull of St Mary’s College Gunnedah, all ranked over 90.
Universities in NSW and the ACT use the ATAR to select students for their courses; it is calculated using HSC results and this year 56,127 students were eligible for one.
Maja said she was kept on tenterhooks when she saw the notification email and tried to click through to see her rank.
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“The website actually crashed, so I was trying to get into it for quite a while … when I saw the result, I was very, very happy,” she said.
Her rank was 95.80: “I screamed a little bit and actually woke up my brother,” she said.
“I was just super happy; I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.”
She said one of her motivations to study hard had been “to do well and make my parents proud”.
Maja hopes to attend the University of Newcastle next year to study physiotherapy.
Emmerson was “stoked” with her ATAR of 92.15.
“I was sitting on the lounge when I saw the email on my phone: ‘ATAR available’ … I started getting a bit shaky, opened it and I was stoked, so relieved,” she said.
She will be off to Wollongong for a double degree in law and psychological science, to which she gained early entry.
She was grateful to her “supportive friends, family and, of course, my teachers”, as well as her best friend Eliza, as they “bounced off each other a lot, studied together and built each other up”.
Eliza said her rank of 91.9 was “much higher” than she’d expected, given she’d been involved in “a lot of other extracurricular stuff”.
“I play a lot of netball; in years 11 and 12 I made 45 trips to Sydney for netball, so I missed a lot of school for that,” she said.
“I was lucky I had some really good teachers – in particular Jody Law and Amelia Woolaston, who were both amazing.”
Eliza also put her success down to support from family and friends, including Emmerson.
She already had early entry – conditional on an ATAR over 80 – to University of Technology Sydney for a double degree in communications (journalism) and law.
She’ll move to Sydney next year to play for GWS Fury in the 2018 Netball NSW Premier League and work at a Parramatta gym, before starting uni in 2020.
This year, 16.7 per cent of students received an ATAR of 90 or above.