I believe it's perfectly OK that you can succeed in Algorithms at one school and not do perfectly at another with the same knowledge. The area where I believe

I believe it's perfectly OK that you can succeed in Algorithms at one school and not do perfectly at another with the same knowledge. The area where I believe the problem is in specifically teaching to a test, rather than general deep understanding (of algorithms in this example). Tests in a lot of cases don't test for deep understanding, but rather memorization and understanding of very specific algorithms. The focus is completely off. It's the "meta-algorithmic structure" that matters for the future of students (when they themselves have to go learn/create algorithms to solve future problems), not just recall the small subset of algorithms they learned in school.