Exact same situation in Turkey. There are a lot of students but not enough universities. You are expected to take a 3 hour and 15 minute exam of diverse topics to determine a score which will determine whether you can apply to a certain department of a certain university. Then, you may get in depending on how many other people also applied to that department and how they scored compared to you. The end result is people saying "Oh, I couldn't make computer science, I guess I'll be a marine biologist." I think pretty much everyone unanimously agrees that it's dumb. It used to work 30 years ago when the number of university applicants was not even an eighth of the current number and the exam was reasonable. When more people started applying, the amount of universities didn't scale up and so they had to filter out more people, and the exam got progressively harder to the point of having trick questions to throw students off.
