UK Exam Boards vs Japan: A National Test Plus Each University's Own Exam

Japan's university entrance system runs on two separate exams stacked on top of each other: a single, government-set national test that every applicant sits, followed by a second exam that the specific university — sometimes the specific faculty — sets and marks itself. Neither stage looks like the UK's model of independent, competing awarding bodies setting a syllabus a school then chooses.

Where the UK asks "which of five boards will examine this GCSE or A-level subject", Japan asks a different question entirely: "which university, and which of its own entrance tests, will this student need to pass on top of the national one." It is a genuinely distinct structure, worth understanding on its own terms rather than mapped loosely onto the UK's board system.

What the Common Test is, and who runs it

The Common Test for University Admissions (kyotsu tesuto) is Japan's national, government-administered entrance examination, taken in January each year by students applying to university. It is developed and run by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations (DNC), a government-affiliated organisation — there is no competing-board model; the Common Test is uniform nationwide, set by one body for every candidate.

The Common Test replaced its predecessor, the National Center Test for University Admissions, in 2021, as part of a broader reform intended to test more applied reasoning rather than pure recall. The exam covers subjects including Japanese, mathematics, science, geography/history, civics, foreign languages, and — added in 2025 — Information I, reflecting a new compulsory computing subject in Japan's high-school curriculum.

The second stage: each university sets its own exam

This is the structural feature with no real UK equivalent. National and many public universities in Japan use a two-stage admissions process:

1. First stage — the Common Test acts as a nationally standardised screen, sat by every applicant regardless of which university they are applying to.
2. Second stage — the university itself designs, sets and marks its own entrance examination, often specific to the faculty (medicine, law, engineering) a student is applying to, and often weighted more heavily than the Common Test score in the final admissions decision.

In the UK, by contrast, the exam board that sets an A-level specification has no connection to the universities reading the resulting grade — Ofqual regulates the boards, but a university admissions office simply reads a grade issued by AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC/Eduqas or CCEA and applies its own offer conditions. Japan collapses that separation: the institution a student hopes to attend is directly involved in examining them.

What an 18-year-old in Japan actually sits

• The Common Test, sat over two days each January, in a self-selected combination of subjects depending on the courses a student intends to apply for.
• A university-set second-stage exam, timing and content varying entirely by institution and faculty, sat later in the admissions cycle (commonly February–March).
• Private universities, which educate the majority of Japanese undergraduates, more commonly rely mainly or entirely on their own entrance exams rather than the Common Test, though many now accept Common Test scores as one route in.

There is no direct Japanese equivalent of GCSEs at 16. Entry to high school is governed by prefectural entrance examinations, set by each prefecture's board of education rather than a national exam board — closer in spirit to a UK local authority setting its own 11-plus than to a nationally set, externally regulated GCSE.

A worked example: applying to study medicine

The two-stage structure is easiest to follow through a single applicant. A student aiming for a medical faculty at a national university would first sit the Common Test in a combination of subjects the target faculty specifies in advance — commonly including Japanese, English, mathematics, and two or more sciences (biology, chemistry, physics) — with each subject weighted according to that faculty's own published formula, not a single universal weighting. Having cleared the Common Test's threshold for that faculty, the same student then sits the university's own second-stage exam: often a written test in the sciences and mathematics at a higher level than the Common Test, sometimes an interview, and occasionally an essay component, entirely designed and marked by that university's medical faculty rather than by DNC. A student applying to a different faculty at a different university — say, humanities at another institution — would sit an entirely different Common Test subject combination and a completely different second-stage exam. There is no single "Japanese exam" a student can point to the way a UK student points to their three A-level grades; the actual assessment is bespoke to each destination.

UK exam boards vs Japan's two-stage system, at a glance

Applying to more than one university at once

A student isn't limited to a single application, either. A Common Test score can be sent to multiple universities and faculties, each of which applies its own subject weighting and its own pass threshold to that same underlying score, and most applicants sit several universities' second-stage exams across the admissions season — in that sense not unlike a UK student applying to five choices through UCAS. The difference is what each application actually costs in preparation time: a UCAS applicant is judged everywhere on the same A-level grades, so five choices mean one set of exams and five decisions. A Japanese applicant sitting five second-stage exams is, in effect, preparing for five separate tests, each written by a different institution, each with its own past papers, format and emphasis — which is exactly why bespoke, university-specific tutoring through juku has become such an embedded part of how families prepare, rather than being a supplementary extra layered on top of school teaching.

Why exam prep looks so different day to day

The two-stage structure also shapes how Japanese families prepare, in a way that has no close UK parallel. Because a second-stage exam is bespoke to each university and faculty, students preparing for competitive places commonly attend juku, private after-school cram schools, that teach not just general subject content but the specific question styles and past papers of particular universities' second-stage exams. This is structurally different from UK exam tutoring, which typically supports a student through a single, standardised specification shared by every school using that board — an AQA maths tutor teaches to the same specification whichever school the student attends. A juku preparing a student for, say, a specific university's medical faculty exam is teaching to a target that literally no other institution sets, because no other institution's second-stage exam is the same.

What the contrast reveals about the UK

Japan's model makes visible a distinction the UK usually keeps invisible: the difference between an exam that certifies what a student knows, and an exam that decides who gets a specific university place. In the UK, A-level grades do both jobs at once — the same qualification, from the same board, is read by every university a student applies to. In Japan, those two functions are explicitly split into separate tests, one national and one set by the destination institution itself.

That split has a cost — Japanese students effectively prepare for two different exams with two different logics, often via a dedicated preparatory year (a ronin year) if their first attempt falls short — but it also means a university can test directly for what its own courses need, rather than relying entirely on a general-purpose national qualification. The UK's alternative, a single grade from an independently regulated board that every university accepts on the same terms, trades that institutional specificity for simplicity and portability.