Bachelor of Advanced Computing (Research & Development) (Honours)

The BAC R&D is a 4 year undergraduate computer science degree with a compulsory honours year. It is like the BAC but with lots of research project courses prior to your honours year and a high ATAR and GPA requirement.

It is marketed to high achieving students who want to study computing with a prestigious degree and pathways into postgraduate study (PhD/masters) or high end computing jobs.

The degree plan is very prescriptive and as such it is not a good fit if you have lots of prior programming/computing knowledge or if you want to study lots of maths or physics alongside computing. In these cases, the Bachelor of Philosophy (despite the funny name) is the better choice - it's a prestigious, highly selective science degree with a large research component, and you can choose any science or COMP courses you like. (The only, very minor downside is that the BAC R&D is ACS accredited, while the PhB isn't, if that matters for you - it sometimes comes up for visas and so on.)