nc43 <nc43@hotmail.com> dixit:
>> Out of curiousity, what kind of entrance exams do you take there? Are
>> they more like the US standardized multiple choice, or more like 
>> various Japanese screenings?

Neither, really.

>Universities do not administer entrance exams. Everyone gets a tertiary 
>entrance grade from their school which can be used to enter most 
>undergraduate courses. The uni's set a "cut-off" and people above that 
>get in, and those under that grade don't get in.

>But arriving at the entrance score is different depending on the state. 
>Queensland has a ridiculous system where you compete against your 
>schoolmates in the same subjects at the same school. So going to a shit 
>school is an *advantage* because your competition is worse.

Victoria runs a common assessment system in the last two years of
school, leading to the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). People
aiming for further study do a mixture of in-school assignments and end-
of-year examinations. They depend a bit on the subjects, but are not
usually standardized multiple choice tests. The in-school stuff is
moderated using external panels, so teachers are discouraged from
ramping up their own students' grades. All this leads to an
"Equivalent National Tertiary Entrance Rank" (see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalent_National_Tertiary_Entrance_Rank) which
is used by universities for selection. In 1995 my youngest daughter got
a rank of 99.25, which meant that she was in the top 300 out of about 
40,000.

The "cut-off" mentioned above varies from year to year according to 
the number of places available and the number of students applying. The
most sought-after places, such as medicine, dentistry, law, etc. have
cut-off ranks in the high 90s.

The UK has a very quaint system. The universities do their selections
*before* the A-level results are available, so they do it on the
expected grades submitted by the schools (plus interviews to make 
sure that only people with the correct accents get into Oxford and
Cambridge.)   8-))}

-- 
Jim Breen        http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Clayton School of Information Technology,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia 
ジム・ブリーン@モナシュ大学