> Throughout my CS studies, I was just collecting "tickets" (very hard to translate the actual word, "Schein"), which basically just attested that you have passed a course. They (often) had a grade on it, but it did not matter. Instead, once in the middle ("pre-diploma") and once at the very end of your time at university, you'd have oral exams. And those determined your grade. To attend them, you needed the right combination of "tickets".

What you are describing was one of the systems they used.

So at my university (OvG in Magdeburg) they used this system for math, but computer science had written exams.