Raw Mark to ATAR Calculator

This ATAR calculator serves a fundamentally different purpose to those calculators, and it is intended to output very different results. Other calculators take your aligned marks, which are the marks that NESA sends you in December. These are different from the raw marks that you actually score in your HSC exams, which you won’t get back unless you pay NESA for a raw marks report, which costs $30-$50 per subject.

Other ATAR calculators are mostly useful on results day in the gap between the release of HSC results and ATARs - this is why when you enter your trial marks into other ATAR calculators, the ATAR output feels so low.

You can read more about this process on NESA’s website here.

If you’re trying to calculate your ATAR based on your trials results, past paper results, or how you think you will go in the HSC, enter those marks into the Raw Mark column. If you’re not sure, this is probably the column you should be using.

If you already have your HSC results (or only some of them, for accelerated students), enter those marks into the HSC Mark column.

An advanced mode is also available for students who want to see how the scaling and alignment change from year to year.

If you are trying to estimate your ATAR based on the marks you think you’ve scored in your trials or HSC exams, then yes. This is the only publicly available ATAR calculator which supports this functionality.

If you are trying to estimate your ATAR based on your NESA-provided HSC results, it matters less. This calculator does have a more sophisticated and accurate scaling algorithm compared to other calculators, particularly for the bottom 25% of marks in a subject. The calculators offered by UAC (ATAR Compass), HSCNinja, and Matrix Education are reasonably accurate when using HSC marks due to the ample data available. carrotATAR is generally more accurate; however, there is a degree of variance because HSC marks are rounded to the nearest integer. So the calculator that is most accurate for your HSC marks will be mostly down to random chance.

Just make sure to avoid the new crop of ATAR calculators that have been vibe-coded with AI as many of these have terrible accuracy and/or don’t even use UAC data - keep an eye out for things like green or blue/purple gradients.

Your raw mark is the mark you get in the actual HSC exam before alignment or scaling is applied. Think of it sort of like the marks you get back when you sit your trials. You do not receive this mark.

Your school assessment mark is formed by applying the process of moderation based on your in-school ranking in each subject, and this calculator (and every other ATAR calculator, for that matter) doesn’t take this into account. As a general guide, if you outperform your typical results in the HSC, this calculator will overestimate you by a bit, and if you underperform it will underestimate you by a bit.

Your HSC mark is formed through a combination of your aligned exam mark (titled Exam Mark in your official results) and moderated school assessment mark (titled Assessment Mark in your official results). Your HSC mark, Exam mark, and Assessment mark are the only marks that NESA sends to you in December. The Exam mark is an adjusted version of your actual raw mark in the exam. You can read more about this process from NESA here.

Your scaled marks are calculated by UAC but they are never revealed to you. They are normalised marks that account for differences in student performance between subjects. They are determined from your raw marks, and are used to calculate your ATAR. The scaled marks from your best 10 units (including at least 2 units of English) are summed into your aggregate out of 500, which is then ranked to find your ATAR.

A blog with full technical details is coming soon - for reference of our general methodology you can see the original spreadsheet’s methodology here, but note that our methods have become significantly more sophisticated and accurate since then, particularly for scaled marks. For high marks in popular subjects, the difference in result outputs is fairly minimal.

You can also test out our alignment calculations by going into advanced mode and then entering any raw mark and its corresponding year from rawmarks.info, which should result in the correct HSC mark being displayed. If you encounter any issues, please email us at [email protected].

This ATAR calculator is only possible due to the efforts of past students who challenged the government and brought transparency to the alignment process, and the continued efforts of rawmarks.info to collate the data requested by students. You can read more about these efforts here. This calculator uses the data from rawmarks.info and UAC to form models that reverse-engineer the alignment and scaling processes.

This calculator is entirely free for all users, and if you wish to support the calculator’s continued improvement, we encourage you to contribute your raw marks to us at [email protected] and also to rawmarks.info.

Please feel free to email [email protected] or message @astra110 or @carrotssss on Discord. Please be patient as we offer this calculator for free and designed it during our free time as uni students :)