And this would be why. I am talking about our system. And certainly, in our system someone can still change their field of study - stop their current studies and start doing something else the next year or semester - but I don't see it as a huge barrier for them to take the other entrance exam, then. If necessary, of course, for fields that are relatively close together it might be waived perhaps.

Entrance exams don't test someone in what they want to study, obviously. They test the knowledge and the skills that they would need to have beforehand. Our med school entrance exams, for instance, largely test for high school science knowledge, with some logical reasoning and other things thrown in. Entrance exams for humanities could include language skills in those languages that were already taught in high school, critical reading and thinking skills, and the like, and mathematics for those humanities that require some. A field like mine, Middle Eastern Studies, obviously couldn't put Arabic or even historical knowledge about the region on the entrance exam, but it could put English and French (and arguably German), and critical reading/thinking tests.


As you can tell, I don't think very highly of them. Having a single standardized test for all students means that you end up with a test that is way too easy in the mathematics from what I've seen (which is then compensated by fierce time pressure so that getting the maximum score isn't a piece of cake for the better students, but time pressure is a poor substitute for aptitutde testing if you ask me), and the usual problems of ambiguous questions in the language parts (admittedly, this would be a trap to avoid in the humanities entrance exams I'm advocating for our system too). Unsurprisingly, I have a far higher opinion of the SAT-II tests, as those at least are allowed to be on a serious level since they're not supposed to be taken by everyone.