I was just wondering whether IB would offer me a greater chance in being accepted into an Australian university for medicine rather than NCEA.
Hi Hannah,
Both pathways offer equal chances for being accepted into Medicine in Australia, as Australia recognises NCEA equally as other pathways.
NCEA has relatively favourable ATAR Conversions for Australia where they take your top 90 credits from your last two years of NCEA Level 3, so it is slightly easier to achieve a 99.95 ATAR, whereas for IB a perfect score of 45 (including bonus points) is necessary to achieve the 99.95 ATAR.
You can look into things in a lot more detail if you like with the NCEA ATAR Converter and IB ATAR Converter, as it gets more complicated for a wider range of ATARs.
However, an ATAR of 99.95 is definitely achievable in both pathways as long as you work hard and strategically.
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Hi, when you say they take your top 80 credits from your last two years, does this mean they also use 80 of your top Level 2 credits, in addition to the 80 of level 3?
Not quite, they take only NCEA Level 3 credits over the last two years, so that students who did Level 3 subjects early in Year 12 can still use this for their application. I was also mistaken above in saying your top 80 credits, where it is your top 90 NCEA Level 3 credits over the last two years that they use. Here’s the NZQA Page explaining the ATAR process, I’d recommend checking this before you make your application too in case they update the ATAR conversion process.