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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

Saw an interesting proposal on HN a few months ago WRT entrance exams:

My university just allows anyone into first semester, but then has quite hard courses and exams there already – by the end of the second semester, 90% have already failed.

That’s another way to solve the >10x applicants issue.

Seems like a great way to reduce administrative overhead, judge based on merit, and get students to realistically self-select a college (if you don't, you waste a semester and the associated costs). Problem is that the exams select only for people that are good at taking exams - not always the most interesting/well rounded students.

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This doesn't sound like a great idea for the U.S. system. Students would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars and spend many precious months for an experience with a 90% failure rate. I have a hard time thinking that anyone with other options would accept that proposal. On top of that, even if you're in the select 10%, you're attending classes where almost all the other students are failing. I can't imagine that class discussions are going to be helpful for you.

If this school was free or very cheap, maybe it's an option for some, but with the way things work in the U.S., this seems more like a scam than a college.

I agree. The University of South Carolina (and maybe more) has a nursing program.

They let you into "lower division" for 2 years before giving you a test to gain admission to "upper division."

Fail that test and you just wasted 2 years. Worst is that there are limited spots, so qualified people still get cut.

In many ways this sounds identical to the process of becoming a medical doctor. Fail (to either perform or get lucky enough to get a slot) at any stage and you wasted X years + Y amount of money.

This is already the case at an ordinary large state school. Not 90%, but around 50% will wash out before sophomore year. It is the very good private schools where the percentage of freshmen who will go onto graduate in 4 years is in the 80s and 90s.

Germany has such a system in place, but not without limits. How important your Grade is depends on the subject you are studying, how popular it is and how well grades correlate with success. For example, you can not be sure of a spot in a medicine school unless you have neat-perfect grades, whereas engineering or practical sciences are nearly a free-for-all, with 90% leaving after the first semester.

I don't believe a purely merit-based system could work on a large scale with popular subjects such as medicine.

I argued in a similar thread that universities should use tests just as a minimum filter. Sample equally from the top n% of scores. If you just take the very top, you just get people who have trained for that specific test, not necessarily smarter students. Or even self motivated students if their parents put them up to it.

But it really does suck that testing is so unreliable. Like for those merit based certification ideas, where they want people to pass a standardized test to get certified for a job. Instead of going to an expensive prestigious university to prove the same thing.

This is how the Harvard Extension School works. Unfortunately, it's backfired on them a little, especially given the staggering admissions process of the other schools in the university, and it's commonly known as "the school that anyone can get into" But passing the first three classes and actually being admitted into the program is very difficult. Most people just use it to take a class or two and leave.

Sounds like how medical school in France works, or at least did while I was there. Anyone with an "academic" HS diploma (40% of people or so) could sign up, but the overwhelming majority failed the first year. Their options were repeat the first year or go into a less prestigious track like nursing

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