Looking at what students with similar HSC courses have gone on to do at university could stop high school leavers from making the wrong choice, reduce attrition rates and raise scores.
The Universities Admissions Centre has developed a machine learning tool that uses data on past applicants' HSC subject choices, ATARs and university course decisions to recommend the fields of study best suited to individual students.
UAC has developed a tool to help year 12 students make better post-school decisions.Credit:Louie Douvis
The course compass tool, made with data from more than 110,000 school leavers who have applied to universities through UAC, has been released this week to help year 12 students make better post-school decisions.
"Not everyone's certain about what they want to do and no one wants to set students up for choices that will result in them dropping out or having a HECS debt that they can't repay," UAC's general manager of marketing and engagement Kim Paino said.
Rising dropout rates among university students have become a concern for the sector in recent years, with more than one-fifth of students leaving their course.
The tool is based on neural network modelling, which is a simplified version of the way the human brain processes information.
It has analysed the nearly 27,550 year 12 subject selection patterns available to ATAR-eligible students and linked that to students' university application. It offers data to identify common paths of future study.
UAC also looked at students' university results to check whether the tool's recommendations aligned with success in that field for other students with similar year 12 study patterns.
"Turns out if you followed the recommendation, your grade point average [at university] was likely to be higher," Ms Paino said.
"It's good to see we got that validation, there's a level of comfort there that we can help them make a better choice."
More than 5000 students have already used the tool.
Ms Paino said the tool was developed in-house after UAC started looking at the data it has collected.
"In the last few years, the whole idea of utilising and analysing data has taken off in every industry and ours is no exception," she said.
The next step for UAC will be reverse-engineering the data to recommend the optimum HSC subjects for year 10 students who want to go into a specific field at university.
"One of the things that we did before we released this tool was to talk to school career advisors and we thought that would be equally useful, if not more so, because with a lot of where you end up in university, the die is cast with your course selection in year 10," Ms Paino said.
"We're hoping to have it up and running for next year's year 10s, when they choose their subjects around May."
Ms Paino said the tool could also be expanded to include information about career opportunities in different fields but UAC is currently looking at whether, and how, students will use the tool.
Education reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald
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