Annual preliminary university entrance examinations administered by the government began Saturday at 684 locations nationwide to screen 602,089 applicants with tests in six subjects.

While the start time of the exams was delayed at a venue in Chiba Prefecture due to a problem with railway signals, they began smoothly and on time elsewhere.

A total of 478 universities -- 95 state-run, 73 other public institutions and 310 private schools -- will use the results of the machine-tallied tests as the basis for selecting students to take second-stage exams.

The number of universities using the two-day tests -- administered by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations under the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry -- was an increase of 45 from last year.

Of the applicants, some 446,000 are third-year senior high school students due to graduate in March while about 149,000 have already graduated from high school. About 6,000 are not high school graduates but are eligible to take the university entrance exams.

The number of applicants topped 600,000 for the first time since the current exam system was introduced in 1990, and the ratio of female applicants stood at 40.1 percent, exceeding the 40 percent mark for the first time, the center officials said.

Only one in 4.1 applicants will be accepted by the universities, the same ratio as last year, they said.

The six subjects are foreign languages, geography and history, mathematics, Japanese language, physics and chemistry, and social studies. Applicants were also allowed to choose Korean for their foreign language exam for the first time.

Sixty-two percent of the applicants have requested that the center disclose their exam results under a system introduced this year, the officials said.