As it turns out, baka and test does not work when it takes itself seriously.
For starters, the basic setting, while it seems interesting at first, makes no sense on anything but a surface level. For some shows, (slice of life and comedy) this is okay, as deep reflection on the setting is not an essential part of the experience. However, in a show that prides itself on its deep philosophical aspects, the fundamental flaws in the setting make engagement impossible.
The core plot of the first episode is simply that the students go to a prestigious school, where everything is provided for them, to be bought with points allotted at the beginning of each month. The loser class that the story follows spends their points frivolously, and is shocked when they discover that the amount of points they have is lowered by their bad behavior. Their teacher mocks them for not figuring this out, mentioning that she had said that their point allotments were based on merit in the beginning. The show brings to attention how obvious this was, to the point where I did not even realize that it wasn't supposed to be while watching. Yet, for some reason, nobody even considered it.
This starts the show's trend of lazy writing with selective idiocy on the parts of the characters, where despite being students at the nation's premier prep school, regularly fail to understand basic concepts, rather than coming up with a reasonable reason for the characters to fail and create conflict.
Furthermore, along with the forced conflict, the stakes riding on this conflict are equally nonsensical, with the big reveal that any character who fails a test will be permanently expelled. This is treated like the end of the world, and due to the structure of the series, from the viewer's perspective expulsion of a character would be equivalent to death, being their complete removal from the story. However, to the characters, if they were already failing with no hope of recovery, expulsion would be an actively good thing, so the only shocking part about this consequence is that anyone in danger of being expelled wouldn't have dropped out or transferred already.
The story then proceeds to use this faulty setting as a premise to try and explore deep and philosophical questions such as "does equality truly exist". However, this question's meaning is almost completely lost, because when the premise is this divorced from realism, we know that the plot will magically contort itself to drive home whatever moral the author feels like forcing on us. Characters will act absurdly, impossibly unlikely coincidences will occur, and certain key aspects of society and human behavior will be overlooked, just so that the main character, and by extension the author, can be proven right in his morals.
Fiction is an incredibly powerful tool for investigating philosophy, and a well crafted story can do very well as an example of a particular branch of philosophy. However, rather than doing this, classroom of the elite simply makes bold statements like "equality does not truly exist" and proceeds to simply showcase supposed examples of "inequality" while ignoring all factors that would contest its viewpoints.
