I do work in a related field and give your answer really sad. The answer is simply that standardised tests are not a suitable measure of learning. They miss mos

I do work in a related field and give your answer really sad. The answer is simply that standardised tests are not a suitable measure of learning. They miss most of the important insights and even efforts to open up, like the attempt to measure 'problem solving'in PISA, are damned to stick to very narrow concepts. Standardized testing is good for: - measuring system performance against set standards - giving basic insights into student's average level of knowledge of a subject (if you use a thorough theoretical framework to conceptualise learning outcomes and link test items to this) - maybe measuring school performance against standards - maybe measuring teacher performance against standards But for students this individual measure of an exam is simply not a good measure of learning in any modern education system. Yes it is a useful measure in really bad systems where teachers are bad and teach wrong things, or where eg attendance and exam fraud are huge issues. But modern pedagogy is not about teaching book knowledge which is easily measured. In any Western education system we are mostly past that point. It's about helping students discover own interests and abilities, develop competence and confidence, experiment, fail and try again. This learning is simply too individual and hard to measure for a standardised test. The only option is formative assessment (essentially teachers grading students repeatedly throughout the year on things like effort, achievement of general learning aims, additional development, results produced, presentations, support to other students, etc - a bit how you would measure a good office worker). Or maybe let's do like Finland and Estonia and let's mostly eliminate the testing burden.