After ATAR results are released, a parent always phones the Victorian Tertiary Admissions Centre to ask if their child has achieved a high 99.95 or a low 99.95.

“My advice to the parent is to go and give your child a hug,” the centre’s communications director Suzanne Connelly said.

Ms Connelly is part of the team who work tirelessly around the clock to ensure everything goes smoothly on results day.

The work begins long before results are released to more than 40,000 students this Friday.

One week before students' phones light up with their ATARs, a team of professors, statisticians and IT programmers bunker down in an unremarkable-looking meeting room to rank thousands of students.

Over the course of a weekend, they run algorithms and scrutinise and scale the results of thousands of students. The end result is a four-digit rank known as the ATAR.

Dr Stephen Farish is in charge of the scaling, a process he says many people don’t understand.

“We don't sit around and decide that we are going to scale a study up or down,” he explains.

“We scale subjects so that we can add two 30s together and know they are equivalent.”

Scaling adjusts the study scores in each subject to take account of the strength of the competition between students.

It does this by looking at how well students in that subject performed in their other subjects.

As the experts are poring over the data, they have to interrogate what is known as a “forbidden combinations”.

For instance, if a student enrols in more than two maths, history and English subjects, only two of these subjects can be included in a student’s top four subjects.

Other issues that might crop up include two students with the same name, same birthday, and who attend the same school.

“That’s our worst nightmare,” Krunal Shah, an IT programmer, said.

This conundrum crops up because in some cultures, it’s common for the first son to be named after their grandfather. This becomes complicated when twins are born and given the same name.

Staff at the admissions centre have to take extra care to ensure these students’ results don’t get mixed up.

Security is tight in the lead up to results day.

The venue where students' results are printed is kept top secret, and IT whizzes at the admissions centre try to hack the data to ensure it’s secure.

Staff scour social media to ensure students have been able to register for their results and there haven’t been any leaks.

Two years ago, 2075 VCE students prematurely received their VCE study scores and ATARs via SMS five days before the official release.

The bungle was blamed on an external company, which has since lost its contract with VTAC.

When results day finally arrives, chair of the scaling committee Dr Sue Willis always wakes up with the same sensation.

“I feel like it was when the clock turned over at the year 2000,” she said. “It’s that kind of moment when everyone thought 'is the world going to fall in?'"

Bleary-eyed staff arrive at the admissions centre at 5am.

Just before 7am, the countdown begins on a large screen. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Then, the moment everyone has been waiting for.

The directors of VTAC and the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority hit an “activate” button on their computers and the results are released.

Immediately afterwards, the calls start flooding in.

Students might discover a subject is missing from their transcript because a school has forgotten to submit their results.

Staff at the centre then have to painstakingly amend the results.

If everything goes smoothly, breakfast is served at 8am.

Staff gather in a room to tuck into bacon, eggs and gluten-free muffins. It's the first time they've stopped all morning.

“There is a lot of energy," Ms Connelly said.

“That morning is an adrenaline rush."

The Age