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sure, but kids education is about building useful skills for life. passing a test is not a useful skill, if the test is useless.

teaching kids problem solving and how to be productive is important. maybe that means knowing how to solve certain mathematical equations, maybe that means knowing how to use tools like ChatGPT. focusing on the math just for the sake of passing tests because that's what we've got good tests for isn't super helpful to anybody.

Passing tests is not useless. It shows knowledge at the level of the test.

I write tests for my code and when they fail I know I have to change something. If you're finishing a math test and not passing, then you don't have the skills to solve the problems in said test.

Tests are only useless when you ace them.

Beyond that, there’s research[0] showing that testing humans actually increases their retention on that subject — we don’t just gives tests to kids to evaluate whether they successfully learned something.

[0] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/spaced-repetition/2006-roed...