Each December, two former teachers bunker down in the war room of the ACT Board of Senior Secondary Studies to calculate the ATAR rankings of thousands of Canberra students.
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It's a slow and at times tedious process, one that has meant many long nights for certifier Lyn Mernagh over the past month.
"It's always a race once they finish their assessments, we've done a few eighteen-hour days," she said.
While Ms Mernagh remembers a time when the deciding calculations were still done on pen and paper, these days the job mostly involves writing code.
"We run code, we write code, we check trends, we double-check the calculations, and the scores," she said. "I love it."
On Friday afternoon, about 3000 students across Canberra received their ATAR rankings online - though many had already been invited into school for an early release of the numbers with staff and psychologists on hand.
Thomas Evans of Canberra College wasn't too fussed about his ranking - so long as he beat his older's sister's high marks.
"I've been trying to put it off, if I get into ANU I'll be happy," he said.
But logging in to find out his own digits with the family gathered around on Friday afternoon, Thomas admitted the jitters were starting to kick in.
"It's started to hit me, I'm actually going to get my ATAR today, it's pretty much going to decide the rest of my university...I'm really nervous," he said.
After a few minor technical hiccups courtesy of the tight internet leash his mother Michelle kept him on during all those long months of study, the nerves melted away into excitement.
He had outstripped even his own wilder predictions - achieving a ranking of 99.2.
"I'm very happy with that, I'm - wow," he said.
Embracing her son, Michelle said she was ready to dance around the living room. Three of the Evans siblings have now been through the nervous wait for their ATARs , with just young Natasha left in the family to graduate.
Having recently achieved his first university distinction through a maths extension course at the ANU, Thomas plans to take a gap year before hopefully returning to the national university as a fully-fledged student.
"I want to do the standard back-packing through Europe gap year, then come back and study engineering or maths, even arts science [like] my siblings."
While the Evans family were celebrating on Friday, Ms Mernagh said she sometimes found herself in the role of careers counsellor in the days following the ATAR release as disappointed parents rang the office.
"We always get that 'my child only got 83 and they needed 84'," she says.
Of course the ATAR is just one component of secondary education. Almost 5000 students in total will graduate with an ACT Senior Secondary Certificate this month, some of them having overcome significant disadvantage to complete their studies with the support of their schools.
The four-digit percentile rank, commonly known as the ATAR, is used across Australia to gain entry to university. While in most jurisdictions half of a student's final subject score comes down to the dreaded external end-of-semester exam, under the ACT system school work accounts for 100 per cent of that mark.
Ms Mernagh, who studied mathematics before teaching IT, said that meant schools could set all their own assessments, which were sometimes exams, and make small adjustments to the curriculum based on their cohort.
Queensland, which has long run a similar model, is next year moving to intrduce external assessments for "greater consistency and transparency".
Students in both jurisdictions still sit a scaling test assessing general knowledge and analytical skills, which is then used to adjust scores at a state-level.
But the ACT system, which has also been reviewed in recent years, is still working well, according to Ms Mernagh.
Canberra students are technically part of the NSW cohort, she said, and her team work closely with those across the border, as well as national authority, the Universities Admissions Centre, when aggregating scores.
"Teacher skills are so important to this job," Ms Mernagh said.
"You have to be able to understand and emphasise with the situations schools and students are in."
The board will release further detail of 2018 Year 12 results on Wednesday.
