Before Japan's Central Council for Education undertakes the formidable task of revising Japan's university entrance exam, it needs to understand why such exams, both here and in the U.S., fail to make the grade.

An education ministry council could be presenting an over-idealized picture of its proposed reforms of Japan's university entrance exams, often criticized for placing too much emphasis on rote learning.

Tokyo's education bureau chief apologized Wednesday for more than 2,000 cases of scoring errors on high school entrance examinations for the past two academic years, which resulted in erroneously rejecting 18 successful applicants. "I apologize from the bottom of my heart to successful applicants who ...