>It would make a hell of a lot more sense to me if students had to take dozens of standardized tests demonstrating mastery of all facets of the high school curr

>It would make a hell of a lot more sense to me if students had to take dozens of standardized tests demonstrating mastery of all facets of the high school curriculum rather than one great big test at the end of their schooling that measures their ability to remember randomly-sampled fractions of that knowledge. Wait, if the one big test at the end was randomly sampled well, it would still provide results almost as good as requiring 10 to 30 times the same amount of test time and energy per student. I don't think this cost to benefit ratio makes sense.