In historical terms however, in some countries, numerus clausus policies were religious or racial quotas, both in intent and function.
Countries legislating limitations on the admission of Jewish students, at various times, have included: Austria, Canada, Hungary, Imperial Russia, Iraq, Latvia (from 1934 under the Kārlis Ulmanis regime), Netherlands, Poland, Romania, United States, Vichy France, and Yugoslavia among others.
The law formally placed limits on the number of minority students at universities and legalized corporal punishment.
[4] Its aim was to restrict the number of Jews to 6 percent, which was their proportion in Hungary at that time; the rate of Jewish students was approximately 15% in the 1910s.
[6] In the period of 1938–1945 the anti-Jewish acts were revitalised and eventually much worsened, partly due to German Nazi pressure, and in hope of revising the Treaty of Trianon with the help of Germany.
[5] Polish universities were a hotbed of the radical far-right National Democracy and from Poland's independence in 1918 right-wing students promoted the return of the Russian numerus clausus system.
[7][8] Certain scientific and educational institutions in the USSR, such as the MSU Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics implemented anti-Jewish restrictions in the second half of the XX century under the guise of numerus clausus.
[9][10][11] According to Edward Frenkel,[12] this led to a creation of a strong mathematical community in the advanced mathematics department of Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas, which as a consequence was composed to a significant degree of Jewish students denied entry to the Moscow State University.
Between 1918 and the 1950s a number of private universities and medical schools in the United States introduced numerus clausus policies limiting admissions of students based on their religion or race to certain percentages within the college population.
Other more subtle methods included restrictions on scholarships, rejection of transfer students, and preferences for alumni sons and daughters.
[13] Prior to that year, Yale had begun to incorporate such amorphous criteria as 'character' and 'solidity', as well as 'physical characteristics', into its admissions process as an excuse for screening out Jewish students;[13] but nothing was as effective as legacy preference, which allowed the admissions board to summarily pass over Jews in favor of 'Yale sons of good character and reasonably good record', as a 1929 memo phrased it.
Such policies were gradually discarded during the early 1960s, with Yale being one of the last of the major schools to eliminate the last vestige with the class of 1970 (entering in 1966).
The religion preference question was eventually dropped from the admission application forms and noticeable evidence of informal numerus clausus policies in the American private universities and medical schools decreased by the 1950s.
Fields such as medicine, law, biology, dentistry, pharmacy, psychology and business administration are particularly popular and therefore harder to gain admittance to study.
In Germany, the main weight of the student selection lies on the Abitur grades (i.e. high school diploma).
The written exams usually consist of open-ended questions requiring the applicant to write an essay or solve problems.
In France, admission to the grandes écoles is obtained by competitive exams with a fixed, limited number of positions each year.
At all universities of the German-speaking part of Switzerland, the students need to have a high score on an aptitude test that comprises logical and spatial thinking and text understanding skills.
[32] In German law the numerus clausus principle has a constitutional foundation[33] and limits property rights in their number (Typenzwang) and content (Typenfixierung).