&gt; I&#x27;ve never heard of such a scheme. In universal education schemes, like what are common in Europe, competition for top schools is extremely high, a single test score determines the trajectory of a student&#x27;s life in many cases.<p>I am most familiar with the German system (as of a decade ago).  We just don&#x27;t have that many globally relevant top schools, and for the ones we have, competition isn&#x27;t that tough (outside of specific fields like medicine).<p>If you want to study, say, maths basically everyone who clears the threshold can just sign up to any university.<p>And the `single testscores&#x27; aint so, it&#x27;s usually an average of your last two years of high school grades (=Abiturnoten).  These are easily gamed, of course.  If you are willing to wait, there&#x27;s also a queue for eg medicine to get in with worse grades.<p>It&#x27;s not all roses---partly because of almost no selection on entry, attrition rates especially in first year can be truly atrocious.