French here who know a few people from 42. The tests to get in 42 are very basic and they're more about testing your patience than anything else. However, in order to get in the other top schools on this list, you need very high grades in math and physics among other things from high school. 42 let people in that haven't even finished high school. Not comparable. The reason they get 70000 people applying is because it's free, most applicants don't even finish the whole test (it lasts many days).
The real test is the pool, not the internet test.
Learning up to binary trees in a month in c with no experience in programming at all ain't nothing like very basic
