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The term is cropping up on high school student support and study pages, and researchers say it signals a warning for creative arts jobs and AI-proofed careers alike – but what is “ATARmaxxing”?
Professor Sandra Gattenhof, from the Queensland University of Technology’s School of Creative Arts, said she came across the word while researching how choices in high school affected creative degree enrolments.
A student’s ATAR – used by universities as the key criterion for student selection into tertiary courses – is calculated by scaling scores on external exams, according to how competitive the cohort in each subject is.
The idea behind ATARmaxxing is to choose subjects that will scale well and avoid subjects – such as drama, dance and film – where even high marks might not translate into a strong ATAR.
“Some of [the students] provided really deep descriptions about how they do it, which is gaming the system,” Gattenhof said.
“They know they need a good ATAR. It doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t want to do the arts, but they want an ATAR to give them options.”
Gattenhof said it was not an underground practice, and many free and paid-access websites offered ATAR calculators tuned to Queensland’s high school system.
The Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre itself even released an ATAR prediction model earlier this year.
Alongside fellow QUT academic Professor Gavin Sade, Gattenhof has uncovered a link between providing information about how subjects scale and already-shrinking cohorts in creative arts subjects.
“The negative number attached to a subject in terms of scaling and the result in an ATAR calculator speaks pretty loudly,” he said.
For example, QTAC determined a student in the top 1 per cent of general dance last year would have had their score of 100 scaled back to 77.83.
In the applied subject, dance in practice, students would have seen their “A” result scaled to an equivalent 44.33 out of 100.
QTAC chief executive Chris Veraa said scaling outcomes should not be interpreted as a measure of a subject’s worth.
“QTAC’s consistent message is that students should study subjects that align with their strengths, interests, and future aspirations, rather than attempting to achieve a specific rank,” he said.
The admissions centre opened a study into the ATAR system in mid-2025 examining three points of the ATAR system, Veraa said.
These included its suitability, how well it was understood, and its “unintended consequences”.
Sade and Gattenhof warned the system was accelerating an existing “slow decline” in school and university enrolments for creative arts subjects.
“Unfortunately, Queensland is the leader in Australia in terms of number of course closures and the drop in enrolment across all creative arts subjects,” Gattenhof said.
Gattenhof said Kelvin Grove State College, one of Brisbane’s largest schools, reduced its offering to one class in each of the art forms this year.
“That’s a canary screaming that if some of the larger schools can’t sustain [classes], how on earth are some of the smaller schools, particularly in regional, rural and remote areas, ever going to be able to do this for young people in Queensland?” Gattenhof said.
Non-arts subjects were also losing high school enrolments – including agricultural science, physical education, and Chinese – although dance, drama, and film bore the largest drops.
Sade said many schools shifted to offering applied creative subjects since the ATAR was introduced in 2020.
By 2026, 46 schools dropped the general visual art subject, and 83 more schools offered its applied alternative. Drama and dance subjects followed similar paths.
Gattenhof said the shift to the ATAR system in 2020 coincided with arts subjects in high school being “completely renovated” and becoming more focused on critical analysis and written tasks.
“While that is important, it’s not why students predominantly choose the arts subjects – they want to do the practical work,” she said.
Sade said students gunning for degrees with high entry requirements, such as law or engineering, were also affected, as they would be discouraged from studying poorly scaling general and applied arts subjects.
“[That’s] a significant problem for a society that’s looking at a future where we don’t know the impact of AI on the workforce,” he said.
“The skills and the capabilities that might be really valuable for a future workforce – creativity, originality, collaboration, human thought, ethical judgment, working with uncertainty, design thinking – are often clustered in the subjects that are penalised in the scaling.”
Veraa said the number of university course offers through alternative pathways was also rising.
“At-school offers are gaining popularity, with one in five Year 12 offers now made prior to the release of ATAR,” he said.
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