My niece's school (grade school) had a 50/50 scheme for their math exams-50% written, 50% oral. They would fail the exam if they couldn't explain how they answered the questions.

I would've appreciated creative ways to test students like this when I was in high school. Standardized testing just means students who can memorize the material word for word will "excel." For example, our "2nd honor" in high school asked our English teacher, "hey, who is Beowulf? The monster or the wolf?" (I get the possible language barrier being that English is our 2nd language, but to this day I have no idea where she got the "wolf" from). Instead, where I'm from, kids are shell shocked when they hit college and get crazy tests like this. I had a professor (I went to a tech institute) who wrote one problem on the board and walked out and that was our exam for the day. I was like, "where in the fuck is he going?"