I understand your frustration Goggles. I would like to add a couple of thoughts though, if you don't mind.
1. The fat thing is endemic. Your country and mine is fat, adults and children. At the same time schools are cutting back or dropping Phys ed from their curriculums. That is happening around the world, not just the U.S. I think these days kids simply don't know how to stay in shape. I'm not blaming schools for their condition, parents have to take the majority of the blame, but it's certainly not helping matters.
2. My answer to that one is simple. "The max is x, you make anywhere near that, you're doin' good". Forget just sliding through, but I can understand young people needing a set goal to aim towards. For some, "do the best you can" leaves them wondering if they could have done better. There's that little voice in the back of their heads saying, "could I have done one more situp, run just that bit faster? I wasn't throwing up or passing out at the end, so maybe I didn't push hard enough". Giving them a clearly stated goal, any goal, helps.
3. Whingers, the lot of them. If the instructions at the beginning of the test included the words "failure to obey an examiners instruction will result in automatic failure of the test", as I am sure they were, then the whinging little back-talking brats need to go away and learn how to obey simple instructions before they apply again.
Every generation is different from the one before. Every generation has it's virtues and faults. Every generation thinks the one following it is a degraded and degenerate version of theirs.
Of course, there's only one generation who is the exception that proves the rule, with all virtues and no vices, and that would be the 30-something gen-Xer's.
