Finland's ylioppilastutkinto, first held in 1852 and the oldest continuously administered matriculation exam in the world, is the country's upper-secondary leaving and university-admission qualification, and its most distinctive feature is grading every subject on a fixed norm-referenced curve — a set share of that sitting's candidates receive each of seven Latin-named grades from laudatur down to improbatur, regardless of how the overall cohort actually performed. A student sits a compulsory mother-tongue exam plus at least four more subjects across at least three of four subject groups, and can spread these across up to three consecutive spring and autumn exam periods over roughly a year and a half rather than facing one fixed exam window — a genuinely flexible structure most national leaving exams don't offer. Fully digital since 2019, the exam charges a per-subject registration fee rather than being entirely free the way many public-school leaving exams are, and individual subject grades can be resat later to improve a specific result without retaking a student's full subject set. Because Finnish universities apply their own points-based formulas weighting specific subject grades for admission, a student's real competitiveness depends heavily on which subjects and levels they chose to sit, not simply on accumulating high grades across unrelated ones.