Our independence
My Shortlist exists to help you choose well, not to sell you to a university. Here is exactly how we keep it that way.
Rankings are never paid for
No university can pay to appear higher in your matches or to change how well a course fits you. Fit is worked out the same way for every course, and the same way for every student. If we ever can't explain it in plain English, we redesign it rather than ship it.
Our method is published
Fit is a weighted blend of how well a course suits what you told us: graduate outcomes, teaching quality, student experience, cost, location and study mode. We weight those around the priorities you pick, and anything you weren't asked about is left out rather than guessed. Whether you can get in is deliberately kept out of it and shown separately, as a band beside it, so a course can read as a strong fit and a long shot at the same time without one quietly cancelling the other. Each course shows a “Why this match?” panel with the real figures behind it, including the QILT survey year.
Commercial listings will always be labelled
Our future business model is universities paying for premium listings and for the leads we send them, not for better rankings. When that arrives, any paid placement will be clearly labelled and kept structurally separate from your matches. It will never mix into your matches without you knowing.
We're honest about our data
Course and ATAR data comes from Course Seeker; quality and outcomes data from QILT (ComparED). Where a figure is a national priority band or a reasonable estimate rather than a directly sourced value, we flag it visibly. Some courses genuinely have no published data, and we say so rather than invent a number. We don't publish student reviews at all: we have no way to verify them, so we'd rather show none than something invented. The full source-by-source detail is on our methodology page.
How well a course fits you is ours, not QILT's
QILT publishes the survey figures and deliberately does not rank universities. Fit is My Shortlist's own calculation, built on those figures plus what you told us, and it should never be read as a QILT ranking. QILT, the Social Research Centre and the Australian Government do not endorse My Shortlist, and no data source we use implies endorsement of how we use it.
Your data is not the product
If you create an account we hold your email, first name, shortlist and wizard answers – nothing more – and we will never sell your data. Comparisons never change based on who is signed in. The full detail, written for a 17-year-old rather than a lawyer, is on our privacy page.
What this covers, and what it doesn't
The catalogue is 2,500 undergraduate courses at 37 universities, across every study area. We leave out courses that don't publish an entry rank we can stand behind, and Tasmania, where the published ATAR data is from a 2022 collection: we would rather show nothing than something stale. Figures update when their sources publish, and the pages that carry dates say when we last checked them. What won't change is the principle: your interests come first, and nothing you can't see influences what we show you.
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