[LatteLazy]

We know that university admissions is a very poor, deeply flawed process. That people object this year but didn't object last year is very telling. It shows that people will happily accept a bad system with poor results AS LONG AS they are given some small illusion of personal control over that system. As long as people can say "people like me are very unlikely to do well BUT I will be fine because I will work harder than people in my group do" they're happy, even though they are by definition wrong most of the time.

[NovemberWhiskey]

The students just wanted to be measured against the objective standard that they were promised.

This doesn't require assumptions of naïveté on their part about equality of opportunity w.r.t teaching quality, schools resources and so on.