French Education and American Education

Today I was doing some sample grading with the professor I TA for and another TA.  The other TA is french and she started to describe the french baccalaureate system in high school.  Her description was pretty scary.  It seemed very intense. she had 12 subjects and had an exam on each of them. She then stated it was easy all you have to do is know what the professor wants and give it to them. I though this sounded horrible, but I did the same thing in my high school.  I think we rag on American education to much sometimes, like we are outstandingly bad when other systems seem to do the same thing but they just structure it a little differently.