Regurgitation tests

Recently I've slowly been making my way through posts on the blog from previous TOK classes, and today, the one that struck me had to do with school tests. (Thus, I give it credit for my post.) As I look back on my school career since kindergarten, many, if not most, of the tests I have taken were "regurgitation tests", or tests where a student must do nothing more for an A than use the cut and paste method. In my eighth grade history class on a test day, I would sit at my desk with a paper before me consisting of basic questions and answers provided for me- all I had to do was choose the "correct" answer, or the answer my teacher and textbook told me was right. Then there was the matching section that required little to no thought at all; again, answer choices were given with one answer per description leaving me nothing to do but rewrite the answers I easily could have memorized ten minutes before class. Ben Franklin was smart and did a lot of stuff, George Washington was the first president of the U.S., Honest Abe freed the slaves. So what? How does that affect me? Why do I need to know about random guys who have been dead for two hundred years?
It seems as though I was rarely taught about applications and how to have a greater understanding of the information I was slapping onto the page. It wasn't important to me to know WHY, I just wanted the A. I wasn't taught to have an appreciation for what I was learning because I couldn't make connections. Then, suddenly in high school, the teachers expected me to apply, reexplain in my own words, analyze. Yes, Hester in The Scarlet Letter sinned and had an illegitimate child, good for her- now what does that symbolize?
Middle school tests were mostly multiple choice, fill in the blank, matching, write-what-we-tell-you-to-get-the-A. Even band and orchestra tests were cut-and-paste: here's a scale, play it at this speed, get loud right there, don't mess up, go. Little room was left for interpretation. If I wanted the grade, I just had to memorize, memorize, memorize until the information basically rolled of the pen on its own. Then, of course, the majority of those facts had to fall out of my brain to make room for the next set of names, dates, and events. No need to keep the info because there isn't a final exam.
My question is, what was the point? Sure, I learned some basic things about the Pilgrims, compound sentence structure, and Colombus sailing the ocean blue, but how much did the regurgitation really help me? I can't tell you how many teachers have said, "yeah, I know they taught you that in middle school, but actually that's wrong and it happened this way."
Of course, this is all in the understanding that there are obviously concepts that middle schoolers can't really grasp at their maturity level, but could it have hurt to put in some application and analysis requirements? I think we would have retained more useful information had we learned to go deeper at an earlier point in our education.