When I went to college, I knew some kids who had trained their whole life to be test-taking machines. These kids got great grades in school. They sat in the f

When I went to college, I knew some kids who had trained their whole life to be test-taking machines. These kids got great grades in school. They sat in the front row. "Is this going to be on the test?" was their favorite thing to say. They did exactly what was asked of them, and they did it well, although a lot of the time, that's all they did. On the other hand, there were other kids who worked on VR rigs in their spare time, designed solar cars, helped launch linux distros, created early ISPs, and invented NCSA Mosaic. On the whole, these kids probably didn't get as good of grades as the kids in the first group. A world of pure standardized testing would have selected more from the first group and less from the second. I think this would have been a shame.