On ATAR and character
It's that time of year again
Interestingly, test scores DO actually correlate with a lot of these things. Original image here.
So it’s that time of year again. Granted, in a non-COVID year, ATAR and SMH league table announcements would be behind us by now. I think of this time of year as Pinterest time, because this is when we see teachers by the droves streaming platitudes on their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts with themes like ‘You’re more than a number!’ and ‘Test scores don’t measure -insert virtue here- !” I think it’s worth unpacking where this connection between character and ATAR comes from, how it infiltrates education and how it unfortunately could have the opposite of the intended effect.
First of all, I think as teachers we could reflect more on the two years of messaging that we give to students in the lead-up to the announcement of these ostensibly meaningless numbers. We encourage goal setting in a material way, we make huge efforts to depersonalise feedback (and by that I mean decouple it from the person), and we run character education programs to foster the whole student. Incidentally, we include the virtues of hard work and perseverance. We send a strong message of high expectations and that the numbers mean something.
Then every year when results are announced, we pronounce that none of this matters. The incoming Year 12 students hear this message which carries two significant paradoxes. The first is that no matter what happens with your result, you’re inherently good. Beside this being next to meaningless, it inadvertently ascribes a value to the achievement/non-achievement paradigm. The second message it sends is that society thinks of success as a measure of character and these Pinterest-style messages act as a counterbalance to this. Teachers are propagating this paradigm rather than countering it.
The media will continue to celebrate high achievers every year, and they rightly should. The willful and ideologically driven misreading of this celebration reveals (some of) the profession’s discomfort with meritocracy. But it also betrays their own conflation of character and achievement, a belief that this is the way of society and we actively need to rail against it to protect the wellbeing of our students. We are in positions of influence and can easily avoid these kinds of mixed messages. Stopping the Pinterest will help. But also using the power of nuance can help students understand that success and hard work are important, and traits of ‘goodness’ are not necessarily part of this same conversation.