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<p>I may be wrong, but it appears to me that, due to the increasing selectivity of elite universities in the US, most newly admitted students at HYPSM and similar top schools tend to have taken up to 9 or 10 AP classes in High School with a good spread of 4s and 5s in select AP exams. That is in practice equivalent to beginning freshman year with one year worth of college credit and not much different from doing British A-levels for example. </p>
<p>I guess an important difference though between the UK and the US is not so much that entry standards at UK universities are higher, but rather that UK bachelor’s degrees are highly specialized, normally focusing either on a single subject only, or on a combination of two or, much more rarely, no more than three related subjects. Because there are no “general education” or “core/distribution” requirements, it is possible to study an arts/humanities subject in great depth in 3 years only, or, in the case of engineering and natural sciences, graduate in 4 years with a joint bachelor’s/master’s degree. </p>
<p>As for other European countries, situation tends to vary. In Germany for example, many "L</p>