Please explain further? I'm confused. In the American system of colleges and university's if you are accepted into the school then usually the choice of major or degree is up to you. Now you will have to make certain grades in that chosen major to graduate with a degree, but pre-admission grades don't usually exclude you from taking the classes in the major of your choosing. Is it different where you are or am I not understanding what you wrote?
This is strictly how it works in Western Australia, our education system is so backwards that it doesn't even match up to other states in our own country in some regards.
Basically, this is the 'main' way of getting into university/college here (bear with me, it's complicated as hell):
- In your final two years of high school, you do a specialised course referred to (I think it's actually changed now, but this is what I did) as 'TEE', which stands for Tertiary Entrance Examinations. To be eligible for university, you're supposed to sit examinations for at least four TEE-level subjects (they're your normal things like English, Math, Human Biology, History, etc).
- After you sit the TEE, you get a TER (Tertiary Entrance Ranking). Basically, it's a score you get that compares you with everyone else in the state that took the exams at the same time as you. The person that got the highest score in the state gets 99.98 (not 100, for some reason), with everyone else being ranked after them. I got 61.9 as my TER, meaning I'm in the top 50% of the state for the year that I sat the exams.
- You apply for university - no matter which one it is - through a website called TISC (Tertiary Institutions Service Centre). You pick the courses that you're interested in and which university you want to study it at. Then you have to mail TISC off a big fat cheque for ~$40 ($120 if it's past the deadline) before they'll even process your information. You can choose up to six courses and order them by preference - the most desirable course will be #1, clearly.
- When the TERs are released, the universities process all the information on TISC. You need a certain TER to get into each course. If you're unsuccessful with your first preference then they'll look at your second, if that's unsuccessful they look at your third, etc, until they find one of your preferences that you can successfully get into based off of your TER. If your TER is too low for any of your preferences, then too bad, you have to find another way of getting into uni.
It's really quite complicated, and the process took a while for me to understand. The only good thing I found with this process is that you can apply for the same course at various universities so that you have a better chance of getting into the course that you want. I was lucky, I had 4 preferences chosen and, like I said above, it was my 4th and final one that I was successful with.
