Overall Position

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The Overall Position (OP) is a tertiary entrance rank used in the Australian state of Queensland for selection into universities. Like the similar systems used throughout the rest of Australia, the OP shows how well a student has performed in their senior secondary studies compared to all other OP-eligible students in Queensland.

The OP is calculated and utilised in a similar fashion to the Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank in Victoria, the Universities Admission Index in NSW and the ACT, and the Tertiary Entrance Rank in all other Australian states. Instead of being a percentage rank (0.00 - 99.95) like the other state TERs, the OP is a number from 1 to 25, where 1 is the highest and 25 is the lowest.

The result of placing students across the state into this band is a standard normal distribution curve. A conversion table is produced in conjunction with other tertiary authorities to allow conversion from a ENTER/TER/UAI or vice versa.

Contents

1 Calculating the Overall Position
2 Criticism

2.1 Bias Toward Certain Subjects
2.2 Bias Toward Certain Schools
2.3 League Tables
2.4 The System Itself

3 See also

Calculating the Overall Position

OPs are calculated by the Queensland Studies Authority (QSA) for all students who satisfactorily complete the Queensland Senior Certificate (QSC) and who meet certain other criteria for receiving an OP, such as participating in the Queensland Core Skills Test.

Each subject at each school ranks students according to their marks against other students studying the same subject at that school to produce a rank called the Subject Achievement Indicator (SAI).

Two levels of scaling are applied to ensure that each subject the student sits contributes equally to their OP. The first level of scaling - within school scaling - is applied to equalise each subject's achievement level within the school. An Overall Achievement Indicator (OAI) is calculated by working out the average of each student's SAIs for their best five subjects.

The second stage of scaling - between school scaling - adjusts OAI ranks amongst all schools in the state to compensate for the differences between schools.

When all students in Queensland have been ranked, they are assigned to one of the 25 OP bands.

Criticism

As with any system of ranking students whose educational experience has been wildly different, the OP system has proved controversial over its time in use. Criticisms of the system tend to fall into four categories:

Bias Toward Certain Subjects

There is a belief that certain subjects (particularly Science and Maths subjects) are weighted higher than others (generally vocational subjects, although certain of the Humanities subjects are occasionally named in this category) in determining a student's result.
The official response to this has been that it is a confusion of cause and effect. Students who study Science and Maths at a Year 12 level tend to perform better in those subjects because they are good at them already. Such an argument, of course, ignores the similar comments which could be made in relation to vocational or Humanities subjects.

Bias Toward Certain Schools

Certain elite private schools tend to have more students in the higher bands of the OP, which is often seen as a bias towards them in the system.
The official response to this has been that it ignores the fact that the elite schools have substantially more students than many other schools, hence the pure numbers of students graduating with an OP1 will naturally be higher. Further, on percentage bases, many non-elite schools are ranked as highly as the elite ones. A supplementary argument is sometimes mounted that the elite private schools tend to attract better teachers than other schools, hence the standards are higher - the bias is therefore not in the OP system, but elsewhere in the system itself.

League Tables

The publication of "league tables", ranking schools in terms of OP results, has been a controversial topic for many years. Most of the arguments regarding the bias toward certain schools above are used in this debate, as well as the argument that an OP result is not the be-all and end-all of a student's educational attainment.

The System Itself

The determination of an OP is generally an inexact science on the part of all concerned outside of the Board of Senior Secondary Studies itself. Thus, students, parents and teachers are often surprised to see that a student receives an OP sometimes one or two bands lower or higher than they expect. This has contributed to a belief that the system is inherently inexplicable.