[wtmcc]

I’d echo your intuitions about learning, drawing on my experience learning a second language (German) to fluency in my late teens, and comparing them to my half-hearted, dead-ended attempts with a few others (Chinese, French, Ancient Greek) afterward.

To me, it seems the most important factor in learning a language is exposure (à la Gladwell’s 10k hours, and 1 hr in classroom counts far, far less than 1 hr of watching a trashy soap opera). Related and also important is motivation.

Excelling at the classroom model might provide a foundational excitement or make talking with natives less humiliating or help with grammatical minutiae (in German, irregular verb stems and modifier declension, which just take more hours to get intuitively), but has nothing directly to do with how fluent you end up.

I’d guess this test serves more to reinforce an already prevalent, toxic fatalism about learning languages (in particular as adults) than to teach us about our selves.