High Standards

Today I was handed back my homework for one of my classes, and while I had researched everything, I still didn't recieve a steller grade. As we now discovered, from looking at a lot of other people who had significantly worse scores than mine, this professor has very high standards to even get into the 80's. It got me thinking: In America, most of us progress through the public school system putting minimal effort and still getting good scores, because most teachers make the tests modeled very closely with the review sheets, and the test essentially turns into "How well can you do this sheet or remember 2 days before the exam?". In comparison, my cousins in Greece really, really needed to understand something to the depth to scrap an A, and book reports were literally, the size of books. While I am not suggesting to following the insane homework model of Greece, or the Asian system which I think focuses too much on taking exams and not on creativity, America needs to strike a balance between these two so we can advance forward instead of declining year after year in academic competitiveness, especially in science and engineering, with the world. Without any change, I do not see America progressing forward into the future.