[nairboon]

Yes, unfortunately that is exactly how most education systems are designed. A lot of it is also historical baggage (at least in the European school tradition), where states were faced with the issue of educating the masses, which required a lot of standardization and thus also grades. Although nowadays, educational science has long established the detrimental effects of grades, they are still very widespread. Grades are institutionalized nowadays; you have generations of students who excelled in this Skinner box and became teachers themselves, thus perpetuating the grade box.

Fortunately, there are a few alternatives, schools without grades, that don't focus on short-term recall but long-term understanding, intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and self-actualization, like the Ecole d'Humanité in the Swiss Alps: https://ecole.ch/