Repeat a year if you don't achieve is very common (well, *was*) in Italy too.
Also: I'm against preventing kids from school XYZ to ever go to uni..I think they should be always given a chance (by way of entrance exams, consideration of past performances, etc)... there are many different circumstances, and those change, so "mark" a person early on is unfair imho.
Natural selection worked pretty well in my batch, the first year of uni..about 350 signed up for calculus one, 150 showed up at calculus 2 six months later, only 60 came back for the first semester of year 2