Agreed! The situation is similar to professional organizations like ACM and IEEE who act as gatekeeper and moneymaker for academic journals, which make people angry (justifiably so). It's a bad solution, but you need some form of reputation management. You can't have kids who want to enroll to MIT line up in a stadium and have them build metal boxes, or write code. However, you can use these as additional input to the standardized test scores.

Articles like this continuously bicker about standardized tests but don't realize how much better the situation is compared with other countries, like China, India, Japan, etc. There nothing else matters other than your score, here at least they look at your application essay, your extracurricular activities and such.

Agreed. And in Malaysia, the mostly the only way to obtain that score is brute memorization of facts.

But of course the problem is when you place so much emphasis on an artificial exam, you create a large incentive for administrators to interfere with classroom instruction in order to try and cater to the test. This is especially bad when you have poor tests.