Finals week: The time of the year when all college students go absolutely crazy. We have projects due, tests to study for, presentations to give, and teachers to suck up to. We come back from Thanksgiving break to a monumental amount of work to get done within just two short weeks, and those two weeks seem to fly by faster than an entire month.
Now that finals week is over and we are all done posting memes and gifs about how we are drowning in tests and struggling to make it through, I wanted to reflect on the whole concept of finals and express my opinions on how I think it ridiculous that they are used as a measure of our knowledge throughout our college career.
I think that finals are complete bulls**t:
Throughout the entire semester, we have dedicated hours upon hours to completing homework, studying for tests, taking pop quizzes, attending study sessions, and reading hundreds of pages in our textbooks. We have put so much effort into earning the best possible grade that we can to put ourselves in a good position going into finals at the end of the semester. So why then do professors want to completely tear us down and ruin everything we have worked for with one single test?
It is very difficult for me to understand how studying for 4 or 5 tests within the time frame of about four days displays our knowledge of the material accurately. We are trying to retain at least twenty chapters of information in multiple classes and are expected to successfully show what we have learned throughout an entire semester. Didn't we show that when got A's on the tests all the rest of the time?
OH, start studying weeks in advance you say? Well that is nearly impossible when professors plan presentations and papers due the week before finals start. So you want us to spend hours on our final projects and presentations, AND THEN study for a cumulative final on top of that....at the same time? In multiple classes? WHAT PART OF THAT MAKES SENSE.
Our teachers have told us since we were younger not to cram for tests because that means that we are just memorizing the information and not retaining or learning anything. So in college we are supposed to "study", not cram, for four or more tests that cover an entire semester's information and you want us to "retain" and "learn" the information? Yep, that's going to be a NO from me.
The worst part about all of this is that the final is usually worth way more points than any other test taken the whole semester, so doing bad on the final could lower your grade by possibly a whole letter. How is it fair that all the work we have put into the class is discounted because of one test? One test that we had to cram for at the same time as three other tests that all had 20+ chapters on it?
The thing that really makes me laugh during finals (at least I can find joy in one thing during finals week) are the signs posted everywhere that give you "Healthy Tips for Finals Weeks". These usually consist of bullet points telling us to get at least 8 hours of sleep, get some exercise, eat healthy meals, take some breaks, start early, etc. My response to that?
LOL WHAT IS SLEEP?!
In what world do you think that we can efficiently prepare to be tested over hundreds of chapters and still manage to get eight hours of sleep every night? Crazy town, that's where.
There are many students who drop an entire letter grade after taking the final because there just weren't enough hours in the day to study for all of the tests, or they just couldn't retain the information enough to show what they have learned. I understand that "grades aren't everything", but when so many of the students I am in class with are going on to graduate school, to those students grades ARE everything.
In my opinion, finals week is detrimental to the well being of the average college student. Lack of sleep, eating unhealthy because there is no time to cook healthy meals, and getting sick because our immune system is lacking due to all the stress that is thrown at us. The majority of the students that do well on their finals are just really good at memorizing.
College is a place that we are supposed to be learning knowledge and skills that we are going to need in the real world. If none of that information is being retained, how are we going to be successful?
Yes, yes, I understand that finals have been going on forever and people are still very successful. In my opinion, however, I think that students can be just as equally successful without being torn apart by the sneak peek into hell that we call "Finals Week".
Rant over, enjoy your Winter Break :)
