Edit: you’re acting like performance on the test is completely arbitrary. Clearly, it should be designed to avoid this, and to actually test academic mastery. For example, someone planning to study physics should be asked to solve difficult physics and math problems. Someone planning to study history or literature should be asked to write long-form essays on those topics. And so on.

I feel like a lot of people in this thread are only familiar with the American system and thus assume that “standardized tests” all have to be like the SAT, i.e. answering a ton of relatively basic multiple-choice questions as quickly and accurately as possible. That is not the case.