Can someone who actually knows tell us what kinds of math questions were on the test? It's hard to come to any conclusions without any details, and the article didn't seem to include any pointers to the test itself.

My personal axe to grind is that number theory and basic finance, rather than calculus, should be taught to teenagers.

And in my own US public schooling, I found the teachers completely unable to provide any intuition whatsoever behind calculus. It wasn't until two decades later, when I was studying computational finance for fun, that I actually really understood integration as something other than symbol manipulation. Seriously, this whole "teach to the test" mentality may get kids to answer correctly by rote over the short term, but doesn't help them to learn much in the long run -- at least if they're intuitive learners.