What you are essentially describing is "pay to compete". Many sports have a barrier to entry to compete at the top levels. For example, take a look at Magic the Gathering. A top tier deck can cost thousands of dollars, but it only puts you on an even playing field with other top players. Past that point your success as a Magic player is based upon your skill and consistency.
That is because it is an actual __Engineering__ exam, not a programming one. Testing for programming skills in an SE exam is like testing a mechanical engineer's CAD skills. I would argue that the majority of "SE" jobs do not actually entail engineering but software development (or construction), which is only a small subset of SE.
That is fancy, but not very readable. I would have been on the side of the code review which would favor readability over conciseness. Cool trick though.