TURKEY: Hako (17) is an unlikely teenage idol. He's physically unprepossessing, he can't sing and he can't dance. But that hasn't stopped 200,000 Turks from going online to watch a clip of him lip-synching his way through a protest song by Deli ("Mad"), a previously little known Turkish rock band.
"I worked day and night / to pass the exam. / What's changed now? / My future is unclear," Hako mouths, po-faced, over a sound-track reminiscent of the Sex Pistols. "So let me tell you something: / screw your exam system "
Hako's secret is timing. He posted his clip as students in schools around Turkey sat down to the country's centralised university entrance exam on June 18th. The song perfectly captured the widespread mood of rebellious anger.
"I had the tune in my head throughout the test," one teenager commented on youtubes.com, where Hako struts his stuff. Another said the band should represent Turkey at next year's Eurovision Song Contest.
A three-hour exam comprising 180 multiple-choice questions, the OSS has been under attack since it was introduced in the 1960s, not least for being unbearably competitive.
It is the only chance students have of proving their academic value. Yet of the 1.5 million teenagers who sat this year's test, barely 10 per cent will earn a university place. In a country plagued by high youth unemployment, the future of the others is often grim.
"The whole life of families revolves around the OSS for years before exam day," says sociologist Nilufer Narli. "It's a 'to be or not tp be' question."
It's also a question of money. One of the most bizarre side effects of OSS is the way classrooms throughout the country empty out in the weeks leading up to the exam.
"They're all down the road at the dershane," shrugged one high-school philosophy teacher as only two out of 25 students appeared for his class in early June.
He's referring to the private crammers where teachers focus solely on teaching strategies for tackling exam questions.
Turks spend over $1 billion a year on dershanes. No Turkish town is without one.
"Kids going to state schools in the poorer parts of the country are at a disadvantage as it is," says Zafer Akmar, editor of Leman, a satirical magazine.
"The crammers are just adding insult to injury."
Last year, he and his colleagues at the magazine turned their attention to the OSS.
"We were offering a scooter to the student who got the worst marks," Akmar says.
"Nobody applied to enter the competition. I think people must have been ashamed."
This year, one university student decided to resit the OSS in an attempt to get every single question wrong.
Newly graduated in engineering from one of Turkey's top universities, Sefa Boyar spent three months preparing for his record-breaking attempt.
"It was the most difficult exam I'd sat for six years," he says. "I'm worried I may have got one of the biology questions right."
Made more visible by protests like Boyar's, widespread discontent at the OSS has been picked up by Turkey's politicians.
Parliamentary opposition chief Deniz Baykal has promised to scrap the test if he wins power next year.
The education correspondent for the daily newspaper Milliyet, Abbas Guclu, isn't holding out much hope for change.
"We were having the same arguments when I was at school," he says.
"Vested interests are strong, and deep down nobody cares enough to change this system."