Forum calls for reduced emphasis on ENTER

The Age, 28 June 2008; The Age, 17 July 2008; Sydney Morning Herald, 17 july 2008

The Vice-Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University (ACU), Professor Greg Craven, and Professor Alan Robson from the University of Western Australia, have called for universities to reduce their emphasis on students’ Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank (ENTER).

At a forum to discuss social inclusion in higher education, Professor Robson argued that universities needed to find methods of increasing tertiary access for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. He stated that ‘we've got to think a little bit more about how we select people to go to university, perhaps by a broadening of the criteria, and providing more special schemes (for disadvantaged students). What we've been doing in the past has not worked and we can't continue to do it.’

Another suggestion heard at the forum was that universities should take note of secondary school teachers’ recommendations when it came to ‘selecting prospective students’. Yet another suggestion was to increase the number of indigenous university staff that could act as ‘role models’ and help indigenous students to succeed.

The social inclusion in higher education forum came after ACU announced that they would be trialling an Early Achieve Programme, where in addition to students’ ENTER scores, ACU will also consider their character and community service and volunteering work.

‘We need to get away from the idea, in selecting people, that intellect is divorced from character. They are two sides of the one coin… At the moment universities select students in an impossibly crude way. We basically bring students in on the basis of a couple of numbers and we have no idea how they are even derived,’ ACU Professor Craven said.

Up to 50 per cent of ACU’s 2009 enrolments in all of its campuses will be selected through the university’s Early Achiever Programme. To be eligible to access the programme, students will be required to have completed at least three semesters of study in years 11 and 12, provide a written recommendation from their school principal and to demonstrate involvement in their community – through a school, religious, sporting or cultural organisation.

Applications for the Early Achiever Programme will be open between July and September 2008.

 

 

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