Education is a complex topic. I don't claim to understand it, nor do I think we can sort this out in a hacker news thread. What I reject is the simplistic claims like "exams don't mean anything". There are certainly exams that are badly designed, but there are also exams that are well designed. A well designed exam can look very badly to different people, based on what they know and where they come from. It's a bad idea to think exam scores as the single metric of education quality, it is equally bad to reject them completely, because chances are any alternative measurement people come up with are going to be worse.