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Home > Tertiary entrance > OPs and FPs

OPs and FPs

Eligible students receive a Tertiary Entrance Statement at the end of their Year 12 studies. The statement includes the student's Overall Position (OP) and Field Positions (FPs), which are used to rank students for entrance to courses at universities, TAFE institutes and other tertiary institutions.

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What are OPs?

An OP is a student's statewide rank based on overall achievement in QSA-approved subjects. It indicates how well the student has done in comparison to all other OP-eligible students in Queensland.

Students are placed in one of 25 OP bands from 1 (highest) to 25 (lowest). The approximate distribution of students across the bands is shown below. In order to achieve an OP1, a student's achievement must be in the top 2% of OP-eligible students in Queensland.

Approximate distribution of students across OP bands

Eligibility for OPs

Students who want an OP must study 20 semester units of Authority subjects, including at least three subjects for four semesters each, and must sit the QCS Test.

Interstate and overseas students

Students who have undertaken senior studies elsewhere, and are not normally eligible because they do not have the required units of credit, are given concessional units of study. These concessional units help to make up the required 20 units necessary to be eligible for an OP and FPs. These concessional units will not appear on students' Senior Certificates or QCEs, but are granted notionally in the calculation of the OP and FPs.

How OPs are calculated

The OP calculations take into account a student's best 5 Authority subjects, that is, the 20 semester units in which they receive the highest scaled subject achievement indicators (SAIs). In calculating OPs, all subjects are treated equally. There is no bias in favour of certain subjects (e.g. maths and science).

Subject achievement indicators (SAIs)

A student's SAI for a subject shows how well a student has done compared to all the other students doing the same subject at the student's school. The top student in the subject at the school is assigned an SAI of 400, and the least successful student an SAI of 200. Other students are assigned SAIs between 400 and 200, depending on their achievement.

Schools and teachers are responsible for assigning SAIs. Provisional SAIs are available for students to check shortly after the end of the Year 12 school year.

Scaling

An unscaled SAI only gives an indication of the position of a student in relation to other students doing the same subject at the student's school. To allow comparisons between students taking different subjects and attending different schools, the SAI data undergo a series of complex mathematical calculations called scaling.

The first stage of scaling places students in a given school onto one standard scale, irrespective of the subjects studied. The scaling procedure uses the subject-group's results (the average and spread) from the QCS Test to account for differences in the overall capability of students between subjects. A student's 5 best scaled SAIs are then averaged to produce an overall measure of the student's achievement compared to all other OP-eligible students at the school. This measure is called the Overall Achievement Indicator (OAI).

The second stage of scaling recalculates the OAIs so that they can be compared between schools. This calculation uses schools' overall results in the QCS Test to account for the different overall capability of students in different schools.

A student's individual QCS Test result is not used on its own in the calculation of their OP. Therefore, a student's grade on the QCS Test will not indicate what their OP will be.

Field Positions (FPs)

FPs are additional rank orders that supplement an OP. The term "field" refers to areas of emphasis in the senior curriculum. FPs are used by tertiary institutions to provide greater differentiation between students in an OP band, for example, when the number of eligible applicants exceeds the number of places for a course.

A student may receive up to 5 FPs, depending on subject choices. FPs are reported in 10 bands, from 1 (the highest) to 10 (the lowest) in the following fields:

Subject weights

When calculating FPs, the QSA uses the SAIs for the subjects that contribute to a particular field. The extent to which a subject contributes to each FP depends on the weighting of that subject. Although subjects do not contribute equally to FPs, most subjects contribute at least some weight to most fields.

The QSA distributes the table of subject weights each year to all schools.

More information

A range of free publications and resources explain the tertiary entrance process in more detail.

OP myths dispels some common misconceptions about OPs.

Last reviewed: 4 December 2007

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