Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank

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The Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank (ENTER) is the national Australian tertiary entrance score, administered by the AVCC (Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee). It is designed to make it easy to compare entrance scores for students educated in different process of admission for university applicants from interstate.

1 Equivalence
2 Calculation of the ENTER in Victoria
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Equivalence

The term ENTER is only used in Victoria, although the actual rank is identical and equivalent to the Universities Admission Index (UAI) used in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, and to the Tertiary Entrance Rank (TER) used in South Australia, the Northern Territory, Tasmania and Western Australia. Queensland uses a different system called the Overall Position (OP), but conversion tables are published each year to convert the OP to or from an ENTER.

Non-school-leaver university applicants are selected using other criteria: usually previous results, or results in the Special Tertiary Admissions Test.

Each state's university and government education authorities determines the method of calculation of the ENTER or state-equivalent for students from that state, due to the historical differences between different state's education systems. However, these decisions are co-ordinated to ensure that the necessary equivalence is maintained (i.e. so that an ENTER of 90.00 from Victoria will indicate a sufficiently similar degree of attainment as a UAI of 90.00 from NSW, in spite of the differences in each rank's methods of application.)

[edit] Calculation of the ENTER in Victoria

ENTERs are calculated by the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre (VTAC) for all students who satisfactorily complete the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) and who meet certain other criteria for receiving an ENTER.

Students' results or study scores are provided to VTAC by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. Each subject study score is scaled - that is adjusted up or down to take into account the strength of competition amongst the cohort of students studying the subject that year. Scaling is undertaken to ensure that each subject contributes equally to the ENTER.

An aggregate is developed by adding:

the scaled score in a VCE English subject (either English, English as a Second Language, Literature or English Language),
the next best three scaled scores,
10% of any fifth and/or sixth scaled scores (if available),
additional studies such as VET (Vocational Education and Training) or tertiary extension studies may also be considered.

Candidates are ranked in order of these aggregates. The ENTER is the percentile ranking of each student's position on this list in steps of 0.05 ranging from 0.00 to 99.95. For instance, an ENTER of 80.00 indicates that the aggregate was higher than 80% of aggregates. Each 0.05 rank typically contains around 20 students, depending on the number of students in the cohort each year.

Ranks less than 20.00 are typically only disclosed as "<20", as the exact ranking at this low level is not deemed educationally useful and may be demoralising to the recipient.