you basically get to (the equivalent of) 10/10 without effort if you're smart and don't make the teacher hate you completely

Same here. It probably depends on country. Yeah, it's kinda disappointing when winning a math olympiad gives you the same score as merely repeating the teacher's password. (But it's probably even more demotivating if your skills are somewhere in between: if you can do much better than the school requires from you to give you the best rating, but not enough to have your skill recognized somewhere else.)