In my country there is a system where a kid applying to high school gets accepted based on a standard test, or can skip the line by performing well on a contest organized by the ministry of education. In my class something like 80% of kids were admitted through contests. When applying to the university there's a similar thing, except it's much harder to skip the line, but universities are free to set up their own admission rules as long as the rules are based on the national standard test. In my case, the final admission score was calculated something like "90% maths 10% everything else"