Are people cramming hard in Germany or Scandinavia for example? If you can't clear the German Abitur related to your studies, you'll have a rough time at unive

Are people cramming hard in Germany or Scandinavia for example? If you can't clear the German Abitur related to your studies, you'll have a rough time at university anyway. Some filtering makes sense at the door. Else you end up having to recap high school material at university or have tons of extra auxiliary classes to bring people up to speed, who then have this extra load or need to take longer for that reason. Whether I was president of some fancy society in high school has less bearing on how good a physicist I'll be. We don't value the concept of "well-roundedness" here. It's not the job of the university to evaluate people's "character". It's their job to educate people who are capable of getting through the required material. All else is about the upper middle class wanting to push little Bobby in there who has no actual competence versus someone from a poorer background who is good at math or history or whatever but couldn't afford extracurriculars and didn't have connections.