School support

How to use the Early Offer recommendation portal 2025

Welcome to the Southern Cross University recommendation portal for our Early Offer Program.

As you likely know, our Early Offer program allows you to offer students to receive an offer into university before final exam results are released.

In order to place students into the most suitable academic program that will suit their individual needs, we rely on your school to provide us with an accurate recommendation based on their high school grades.

The shared goal is to set students up for success at Southern Cross University.

This video will give you some step by step instructions on how to use this recommendation portal and if you're watching it on YouTube that we have added timestamps as well so you can skip ahead to a certain part of the video that is relevant to you now.

As a nominated school representative, you would have received an e-mail from Southern Cross with a link to the portal and with your login details.

If you don't have these, please send us an e-mail here at futurestudy@scu.edu dot AU or contact your future students officer and we can arrange to have these sent to you as soon as possible.

So let's log in to our portal.

You will enter your username and your password.

You have the option to opt for accessibility mode as well.

If you have limited vision, you can reset your password here.

And should you like some light reading, we have our terms and conditions listed here as well.

Once you've logged into your portal, you'll see specific information relating to you, your students, and your school here.

If you need help, you can select the Help and Instructions link where you'll be taken to our school support page.

So this video will be saved here for future reference.

And there's some additional handy resources here in regards to assessment guidelines and our pathway programs.

So for now, I am going to go back here and I'm going to select Early Offer School Dashboard.

Now Please note, for the purpose of this training, we have created test accounts and test students, so these details do not belong to anybody in particular.

We're going to go through the process now of making a recommendation for an ATAR eligible student.

Before we proceed, please know there's a number of ATAR calculators available online that you can choose to use.

We trust that you will make the assessment on behalf of the student as the person who knows them better than anybody.

So we recommend you use a reputable ATAR calculator such as the ones provided for free by UAC, QTAC or VTAC.

And for the sake of the student success at university, we need your recommendation to be as accurate as possible.

So you will see a list of students here who have submitted their early Offer application and have an recommendations that are outstanding.

And then once they are completed, they will go down here in the completed recommendations list.

So we're just going to select make a recommendation and it's going to take you through to this page here that has some more general details about our program and the portal and it also goes through our three pathway programs.

So the great thing about early offer is, well at Southern Cross is that every single student will be offered a place into one of our programs.

If a student doesn't have quite the background or the academic marks required to get direct entry into the degree, we do have three programs that may form part of their offer here.

So for ATAR students who sit just below the recommended ATAR requirement of their chosen course, it may be Transition to Uni which is a free six week program.

The online course starts in January and successful completion guarantees entry into a Southern Cross degree in line with the start of the academic year in March.

For students who may need a little more support, or for non ATAR students, we have a 12 week free Preparing for Success program.

They may also be offered a diploma or associate degree, which would give them direct entry into a range of second year bachelor courses.

Now, we're very proud at how far our pathway programs have come.

And we can say that students who participate in one of these pathway programs on average go on to have a higher GPA than those who d not.

So we're going to Scroll down here and choose our student of choice.

Wait just a few seconds for this list to load now.

Also, if you do get any notifications or messages that appear on screen, they will disappear after a few seconds or you can just click cross to get out of it.

For today's sake, we are going to recommend James Williams.

James Williams is a current U-12 student, as only U-12 students are eligible for the program and we're going to select the James is ATAR eligible.

Now, a new addition to the portal this year is that you now have the choice to choose the student's highest predicted outcome.

So for example, James here may be on track to achieve an HR of 65.

However, he is also studying and completing a Certificate 4, which as you can see gives an equivalent HR of 73.

So being the hire of the two, you would select Certificate 4 as your recommendation.

As you can see, this would likely be a direct offer into his Southern Cross University course.

But let's take a look at what this looks like if he just fell short of the required ATAR.

So I'm going to go back to predicted ATAR.

There's a list here that loads when numerically you can choose what your calculator has calculated and I'm going to go 65.

And as you can see here, due to his academic level, we would likely offer James a pathway into clinical exercise Physiology through our Diploma of Health program.

So this recommendation here is going to vary based on the ATAR you've been putted and the course choice that the student has selected.

But please trust the recommendation provided.

Please don't change your recommendations and steer off course with your predictions to fast track them into a degree.

It's really crucial that we place them in the appropriate pathway options to suit their academic levels.

So now we will click complete recommendation and you can see the summary just here.

So we are going to now proceed with a non ATAR student.

We will go back up here and select our applicant and we are going to select Samuel Garcia who has applied for engineering.

We're going to go to the drop down.

Yes, they are a current U-12 student.

We are going to say they are not ATAR eligible and as you would know, students who have completed a Certificate 3-4 or Diploma will receive an equivalent ATAR rank.

Please note though, currently we do not accept Certificate 2 as a recognised course entry into any of our programs, so if the student has no ATAR or no Certificate or Diploma, we will select no AQF qualifications.

And they will likely be placed into our Preparing for Success program, the free 12 week preparation course.

And on completion of this, the student can get direct entry into a degree at Southern Cross University.

Complete the recommendation and as you can see, the summary of the applicants that we've input so far.

You can choose to do each student individually if you wish.

You may choose to do a few at a time just in case you need to leave your desk urgently and that you're timed out.

I recommend doing no more than a handful at a time just to minimize any work you could lose to risk being timed out.

You can select Remove last student if there was an error made in the last recommendation that you made.

And then you would Scroll down to the declaration.

Here you would tick that you confirm the predictions are as accurate to the best of your knowledge.

So we really want to see the student have the best possible start to their university experience.

So we do reserve the right to rescind or amend offers if the predicted ATAR is found to be inaccurate.

So it's really important to be getting these recommendations right.

And now we're going to hit submit.

And then you'll see this form submitted page confirmation.

So there's a downloadable form here of what you just submitted if you wish to download it and save to your desktop.

But I'm going to select done.

I'm going to go back into the dashboard and just let you know that we are aware that there is a delay in your completed recommendations going from this list down to this list.

So there's a delay of about half an hour.

After this time, please refresh, log back in, and you will see your recommendations are in the completed recommendations list here.

And then there will be any outstanding recommendations at the top.

And that is how you complete a school recommendation.

If you're receiving any technical issues that are not otherwise covered in this video, our team are more than happy to assist.

Please contact us at futurestudy@scu.edu.au or contact your future students officer.

So we'd be more than happy to assist.

And we thank you for taking the time to complete these recommendations.

We we understand that these things take time, but we know that we share the same goal of wanting our students to succeed and have the best introduction to university life.

Thank you very much.