A reader realizes something important:

I feel like a pawn piece on a 30 year old chess set, who has just been awarded sel-awareness and now undstands he has been manipulated by an agenda far bigger then himself his entire life. I remember over 20 years ago in high school studying each year for the Regents exam, and buying the red Barron’s book for each subject so I could take practice exams that would clue me in to the type of questions I should expect- and more importantly the strategy behind the questions, so that I would not have to think as hard about the content, answer the questions faster, and finish the test on time. That was the beginning for the educational landscape that exists today. The same went for SAT prep, and later GRE prep. Companies making money on showing us how we could beat the test by thinking like the test maker instead of fully being able to process and synthesize the knowledge. Higher ordered thinking requires more time and manpower to assess, and therefore more costly to test developers, so we get sold tests that that do not measure what they claim to measure, and individuals spend hundreds to thousands of dollars for test prep to cheat themselves out of learning the material in the first place. This begs the question, why do we need to learn the material in the first place, if the commercial industry is encouraging us to cheat on the assessment, for a price, in the first place?