What Happens When Language Studies Become Exam-Oriented?

What happens is that in Japan, as I  understand, it junior high school students  

are really enjoying their English classes.  They don't have a lot of, uh, exam pressure,  

um, to get into university yet. But once they get  to high school, English becomes exam-oriented,  

and so they focus on test preparation. And I think  they lose their motivation, or there's a tendency  

for students to lose their motivation because  they're only studying for exams. Not only that,  

not always, but in many cases, the exams here at  Japanese universities are extremely difficult,  

and they kind of aim way above the level  of the students, and so what happens is  

they end up studying really difficult  vocabulary words in preparation for  

those exams. They're not getting the high  frequency vocabulary that they need first.