Maciamo, sometimes it really surprises me that you make such a generalisation about Europe. It's so different in Poland.

Many of the employees is concerned only for good university's diploma, not for the faculty they graduated from. of course, this isn't true in Western-capital firms.

We don't have a lot of exams during the school years. Usually from elementary to secondary there were class test (for a bigger or smaller part of material) or oral exam. the hardest is before the end of semester. We hardle ever have a year-ending exams, it depends on the teacher actually.

here people dont often study what they really want. Many people study what they think is profitable - f.ex. law, psychology, informatics etc. when somebody goes for a exotic (like japanese faculty studies) which isn't profitable at all, people are surprised and asked "why" and "what are you going to do in the future?"

men sometimes study whatever they got into because they don't want to go to the army.