alt Hacker NewsFor entrance exams though... At least in Poland, we had them as well. They were corrupt.
Cheating was rampant, and a very common way for getting admitted was paying professors from that uni for tutoring - who would train them on the type of tasks they would do at that uni.
And it prevented you from attending unis far away a lot of time due to time contraints.
Oh, absolutely. Especially for the top universities. That made olympiads even more important because they allowed students to bypass the exams.
And in the USSR, if you failed to get into the university, you were drafted into the army for 2 years.