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Comment by fosap | Hacker News Reader

I'm German. I'm not sure what you are talking about. You do need to graduate a "Gymnasium" (years 5-12 or 13, right after elementary school). But any "Gymnasium" will do. Every town has a "Gymnasium", you don't have to move or bake cookies.

However, the "Gymnasium" is just one three schools. Only about 30% of students attend. If your marks get too bad you have to leave for "lower" school. On the other hand it's possible to attend a "Gymnasium" of pupils of a "lower" school if they have good grades. (About 20% of my final class came form "lower" schools.)

The German system is a kind of elitist. And it's criticized that the parents income is too important. But it is elitist regarding to your marks, and not your district.

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This is what tracking means -- that you get "sorted" into either they "Gymnasium", "Realschule", or "Hauptschule" track after fourth grade. However, this is not what happens in Finland. In Finland, everybody gets the same basic education until age 16, then picks either general upper secondary or vocational upper secondary education (note that vocational upper secondary education does not bar you from attending a university, despite what the GP thinks).

However, what he mostly doesn't seem to realize is that Germany (or Finland, for this matter) does not really have the same type of highly competitive admission process for its universities as the United States [1].

For example, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, one of the best German universities to study computer science at (according to a recent ranking, the best), has open admission for its CS Bachelor program.

[1] The Bologna Process americanized the system a bit, but it's still mostly about managing supply and demand. If you can't hack it, you won't graduate, but admission is not particularly selective, especially not at the Bachelor level.

> However, what he mostly doesn't seem to realize is that Germany (or Finland, for this matter) does not really have the same type of highly competitive admission process for its universities as the United States [1].

Well that is because the Abitur (german high-school diploma) is regarded equally no matter which school you attended. From what I gathered the US high school diploma is worth pretty much nothing, without knowing somewhing about the school and/or a high amout of AP-classes. Compared to the German degrees, I'd argue that its actually closer to Realschule (the 10yr grade, which does not qualify for university), than abitur. (Except you are at a top-notch school and take lots of AP-classes)...

Don't universties and Fachhochschule discriminate between the Abiturs of different Laender? Bavaria has the most difficult and highly regarded one, right?

No, universities don't do this (though they can consider other factors, including their own admission exams, but this is rare). This is actually a problem, because the matriculation exams are not the same in all German states, so students in some states have an unfair advantage in those cases where grades matter. Supposedly, in 2014/2015 the difficulty level of the matriculation exam will be standardized.

The problem exists because traditionally, grades had not been much of a factor in admission (outside of a few restricted courses of study such as medicine). German universities (prior to Bologna) were used to running an open admission process and instead enforced selectiveness by failing those students who couldn't handle it early on.

I don't know about Germany, but in Finland universities have yearly quotas for incoming students. The applicants take an entrance exam and the quota is filled based on the scores. How could the admission process be any more "competitive"?

Oops, I stand corrected.

I was going by what I was told by a couple of Finnish acquaintances in Estonia a few years ago. My understanding was that while there was a numerus clausus procedure in most subjects, none of them were as hypercompetitive as (say) Harvard's or Stanford's admission procedures, nor did choice of university matter nearly as much for your career (plus, some STEM subjects were supposedly pretty easy to get into).

If that's incorrect, I'll withdraw my statement.

The bar has only recently been relaxed according to wikipedia until recently in the finish system if you went to a poytechnic you where bared from doing a Masters or PHD.

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