If a Year 12 student gets an early offer for uni, does it mean they stop trying?

Early entry schemes for university – where students get an offer before their final exams – are increasingly popular.

For example, more than 27,000 students applied to the Universities Admissions Centre (which mostly deals with New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory unis) for an early offer in 2024. This was a record number and an almost 19% increase on 2023.

On the one hand, early offers are seen as a way to reduce pressure on Year 12 students. But they are also increasingly criticised, with concerns students may stop trying once they receive an offer.

Our new research shows applying for an early offer does not make a significant difference to how hard a student tries leading up to their final exams or their final results.

What are early offers?

The main round of university offers is in December-January, after students have done their final exams in the previous October and November and have their final results or ATAR.

With early entry offer schemes, universities assess students using criteria other than (or on top of) final results.

Amid concerns about students reducing their efforts, in February this year, federal and state education ministers agreed there would be no university offers until September. Federal Education Minister Jason Clare is pushing for a new, national approach to early entry by 2027.

Read more: 'I don’t believe I would have gotten into university': how early entry schemes help Year 12 students experiencing disadvantage

Our research

Our new study investigated the role of early entry offers on Year 12 students’ academic and personal wellbeing.

We looked at three types of students: students applying for and receiving an early offer, students applying for but not receiving an early offer, and students who did not apply for an early offer.

We then looked at multiple forms of academic and personal wellbeing, including:

• the ATAR

• motivation at school (their interest, energy, and drive to learn) and enjoyment of school

• how students dealt with academic challenges (also called “academic buoyancy”)

• study burnout

• overall life satisfaction, mental health and self-esteem.

Who did we study?

The study involved Year 12 students in 2022 from schools in New South Wales.

The average age for participants was 17, most (68%) were female, the majority (69%) lived in an urban area, just under a quarter (23%) were from a non-English speaking background, and just over half were from government schools (52%).

We tracked the ATARs of 1,512 students for whom we had early offer data.

We also surveyed a subset of 525 students from this group. We surveyed them in term 2 of Year 12 and then followed up with a second survey in term 4, about 2 weeks before their final exams.

The surveys included questions about their academic and personal wellbeing. Both surveys were done online.

What we found

In terms of early entry status, 16% did not apply for an early offer, 21% applied but were unsuccessful, and 63% received an early offer.

Using statistical modelling to control for prior differences in achievement and motivation between the groups, as well as age, gender, school type and learning difficulties, we found an early offer did not appear to have an impact on a student’s ATAR.

We also found no impact on their motivation, effort, burnout or mental health.

In fact, the best predictors of students’ final results were their previous results and their efforts earlier in Year 12.

As our research showed, the findings for these predictors were statistically significant, meaning we can have confidence the results were not due to chance.

This mirrors other research that suggests you can predict a student’s ATAR from their Year 11 results.

One important difference

We did find one statistically significant effect. Those receiving an early offer scored about 10% higher in academic buoyancy than the other two groups.

This means these students reported they were better able to overcome academic challenges, such as difficult assessment tasks and competing deadlines, as they approached their final exams.

We found this difference even after controlling for any prior group differences in academic buoyancy.

But we note it was only a relatively small effect.

Why was there so little difference?

Some possible explanations about why early offers did not appear to make much difference include:

• Year 12 is a busy year full of activities (from formals and other events, to plans for life after school). It could be early entry status is quickly absorbed in all the demands of the final year and becomes normalised

• the joy or relief of an early offer is short-lived and students return to their emotional equilibrium or their typical “set point” in terms of outlook on life

• the ATAR looms large in students’ lives, so they may still want to do as well as they can – regardless of whether they get an early offer or not.

What does this mean?

Our study suggests receiving an early offer for university does not make much of a difference to final outcomes.

So this suggests students can apply for an early entry offer if they want to.

But once the application is submitted, they need to return their focus to factors that are influential in final outcomes — such as their learning, motivation, and engagement through Year 12.

Helen Tam, Kim Paino, Anthony Manny, Mitch Smith and Nicole Swanson from the Universities Admissions Centre helped with the research on which this article is based.