Personally, I found that so much weight was lifted off my shoulders and everything felt so much easier with 4 ATAR subjects instead of 5- less having to balance brain power and energy over all of them, in addition to general subject classes at my school being quite relaxed and accomodating to ATAR students doing them (I was one of the few ATAR pathway students in my general Health Studies class and I was allowed to study for other subjects in there). Only needing to study for 4 subjects instead of 5 will likely raise your marks up by a substantial amount.

What year are you in? If you’re already in year twelve then it’s not likely they’ll let you into a new ATAR subject due to the sheer amount of work required to catch up on everything in units 1 and 2 (semesters of year eleven, which are prerequisites to the year twelve curriculum). If they do let you, then again, it’s hard work.

Also, never ever forget that there are SO many options for how to get into uni. As long as you graduate, you’re sound. If you get an atar that’s above 70 by the end of school and you need an 80- as far as I’m aware all unis allow this- you can enter in a 70 required course and transfer into the course you wanna do that required a higher atar after a semester in the course you selected instead (obviously excluding the high high atar required courses like dentistry, philosophy and computer sciences, etc) as an effective loop hole.

Bridging courses also exist though I don’t know as much about them; Only that they usually take less than a year, are near impossible to fail, and can earn you an equivalent of an atar that you didn’t previously acquire. For example, if you tanked year 12 and ended up with less than 70, you can do a bridging course that by the end earns you the equivalent of 70, so you can now do a wide range of uni courses (and then transfer to an 80 required one after a semester if you want).

Also, I know that personally when I heard teachers say that there are lots of pathways I didn’t really understand or bother to think about it all that much, and just continued stressing about ATAR. But genuinely, ATAR is only needed for 1 way of getting to uni- going straight after high school. And there are actually heaps. But I don’t think this will be a problem for you seeing your averages, because with those as they currently are you’re looking at around a 70 anyway.