The current education system of spending 12-16+ years usually consists of spending sedentary time in front of papers, books, computers. Many current courses are weighted heavily towards tests, and most professors dismiss tests through other vices. It's been my experience that most of them design classes to avoid the test, ultimately avoiding complaints. So, why the international alarm that "America flunks Geography"? I don't think tests matter (much). I think it's a rather shallow education to be tested on a country's location, and be expected to know something about it from geography books. This is not a real experience of course, far better to learn geography by going to the region for the 1:1 scale.

The importance of tests, their contents, their significance, their relationships to knowledge is diminishing. Tests are an impersonal and archaic way of measuring knowledge.