On the teacher side, one way to game them is via test prep. Quoting from http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/04/what-test-prep-is... : "learning how to perform the specific cockamamie tasks favored by the designers of the various state-level assessments"
That includes:
> We have covered "How To Spot the Fake Answers Put There To Fool You." We've discussed "Questions About Context Clues Mean You Must Ignore What You Think You Know." We've discussed how open-ended questions require counting skills (the answer to any question that includes "Give three reasons that..." just requires a full three reasons of anything at all, but give three). For lower-function students, we covered such basics as "Read All Four Answers Before You Pick One."
> We have pushed aside old literary forms like "short stories" and "novels" in favor of "reading selections"-- one-page-sized chunks of boring contextless pablum which nobody reads in real life, but everybody reads on standardized tests. We have taught them to always use big words like "plethora" on their essay answers, and to always fill up the whole essay page, no matter what repetitive gibberish is requires. We have taught them to always rewrite the prompt as their topic sentence. In PA, we have taught them what sort of crazy possible meaning the test-writers might have assigned to the words "tone" and "mood."
This is gaming the system because had the test givers used a completely different approach, say, of using open-ended questions instead of multiple-choice answers, or "give persuasive reasons that..." instead of the more easily tested "three", then this test prep would not work. Not that that alternate testing form will happen in standardized tests, because it's a lot more expensive to grade free-form tests. But teachers themselves can ask these sorts of questions, to help gauge proficiency.
Another way to game the test is on the test giver's side - they get to define what the pass/fail thresholds are. For example, "a test question was considered "hard" or "easy" not because it required a particular skill; its difficulty was determined based on how many students got it correct." Quote from http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/08/scoring-ny-tests-w... .
Since the thresholds can be determined after the fact, this means it's not really judging proficiency but instead is making the test give a pre-defined pass/fail curve.