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A quick thread on Dutch university admissions in this coronavirus year, for comparison to the #ALevelsResults debacle.
Admissions here are, even in normal years, completely different. As long as you have a passing grade for the necessary precursor subjects you can mostly go to any uni and course you choose. Very few uni/course combinations have a numbers limit or a minimum grade requirement.
The exceptions are things like medicine (although even then a proportion of places are awarded by lottery) and Double Bachelor programmes (which are higher load so have a minimum grade requirement and an interview).
Students can sign up all through the year, the deadline being somewhere in early summer. So we have no idea how many students we are going to get in late August until June-ish when exam results are known. Which is exciting, but mostly manageable.
This year, central exams for final year high school students were cancelled due to coronavirus. Grades were awarded on the basis of exams carried out by the schools themselves, and coursework. We accepted these results for our admissions.
What if a student thought they would have done better if the official final exams had gone ahead? Well then they could ask to take "improvement exams". Some conditions applied (e.g on number of subjects you could do this for). Grades could not drop below previous result.
And that's it. No drama. Passes did apparently go up, but some are attributing that to students having more time to study due to the collapse of social lives in lockdown! Fin.
