I can tell you about the test in Spain: Ultimately it's actually testing what you learned in school, vs the SAT's IQ + Vocab proxy. Since it asks for so much, i

I can tell you about the test in Spain: Ultimately it's actually testing what you learned in school, vs the SAT's IQ + Vocab proxy. Since it asks for so much, in practice it's testing for the quality of your school too, as if your classmates in high school were bad enough, or your teacher cared little about covering the material, you might not have even covered some of the questions. So in practice, some schools averaged extremely good results in some subjects even for the worst students, while in others the very best always scored badly: Imagine in the foreign language test, one school might have a teacher that could actually communicate well in English, while others didn't. Another fun part is that it limits how much a motivated high school can do regarding unfair grading: In my year, the average grades in high school and the grades in the University test, while relatively correlated, had some very big outliers. Do note that in Spain, more than a matter of which university you'll go to, it's also a matter of which major you'll be allowed to study. In general, high paying, low unemployment majors are basically unachievable by someone that tested badly, or had bad high school grades. So it's not a matter if you are going to the right university, but whether you can study anything you care about at all. I had friends that liked computer science, but were C students, so they had no prayer of studying CS. And also note that, even after you get into college, chances of flunking out are very high. About 15% of students are expelled every year from that CS program, to which you have to add the ones that drop out voluntarily. So more than sorting people into colleges, there's a whole lot of sorting into just getting a useful degree in a timely fashion.