No, it does not happen in US universities today. "Select applicants" are not given trick questions "distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find" in the US.
Instead we have the black box of the college admissions office, deliberating over components of the college application such as essays and extracurricular activities intentionally designed for subjective evaluation, where the outcomes of applicants are incontestible and unexplained, where they do not even need to think about designing difficult questions around simple solutions that would otherwise be cause for dispute.
