I agree with you in principle, but not in practice. The problem is that excessive amounts of time and effort are being directed towards said tests (not only on the part of the students, but more so that of the teachers). I firmly believe that their quantity should be drastically reduced in favour of their quality.

If the government wanted to control population levles, then sure, this might be a good tool. But in itself it is only a slight improvement over existing methods, making it easier to micromanage population control. If an oppressive government wants to control the population, they already have the tools to do so. I don't see what this does to change that. What it might do is make it easier to do so clandestinely *in theory*, but in practice that case seems unlikely.

Why not just let the users do the job? Cheaper, faster and easier...

I guess the reason for why you aren't getting any mod points is that reality is uncomfortable. And it's surprising that not more people on here, a site where most visitors are presumably above the average intellectual level, understand how correlations work. Oh, and there is also this, somewhat simple summary which I think is fairly good at disarming the majority of the drivel that is usually heard in these debates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...