Same in Poland for more than a decade. It's an open secret here that universities admit many more students than they can handle in order to capture extra funding, and then get rid of the excess after the first year.

On my first year, the amount of students was 2x the actual capacity. The first semester was very math-heavy, and everyone knew we had the toughest and CS-unrelated subjects delivered up front in order to weed out half of the year.