I really hate academic rank. Fundamentally it's like saying your understanding only matters relative to everyone else. What a load of crap, tests are supposed to be grounding you to an objective standard, not relative.
Imagine if we let people who couldn't reliably carry others out of fires into the firefighters because they ranked highly among a group that couldn't, or denied those who could because they ranked low among a group that all could.
As soon as you look at the system outside of academia, it's undeniably counter productive and displays a complete lack of understanding of testing as well as critical thinking ability.