For all of my life, I have enjoyed school. I know that sounds like a pretty incomprehensible thing to say, but I honestly think getting an education can be fun, especially if you’re taking the right classes and you have the right professors. School, especially college, exposes you to different people and different perspectives, and it has been nothing short of a positive experience for me.

It’s hard for me to think any differently about college until finals week comes along and I am reminded of the hell I have to endure to secure my good grades. Every semester leads to another week of finals, and every semester I am left scrambling for some sense of sanity as I plow through four months’ worth of homework and tests to study for exams that are worth half of my grade. And each time I go through all of this, I think to myself—what’s the point?

Quite frankly, final exams don’t do anything but ruin people’s love of learning and self-esteem. I work diligently all semester to maintain straight A’s, but once I am faced with having to study or write papers for five different classes all in the same week, I am bound to do badly. Finals do nothing but set us up for failure. How am I supposed to write a 20-page paper for one class when I’m too busy studying for a 50-question multiple-choice exam for a different class? It’s impossible to succeed at the level professors want us to, and it’s even more infuriating that they act like their class is the only one that matters when we are taking 12 other equally-important units in the same semester.

For the past two weeks, I dedicated my life to finals. I worked on final projects, papers and exams that are worth half of my grade. Each night, I had a mental breakdown over all of the work I had left to do, and all of the work I believed I didn’t complete correctly. I literally made myself sick from constantly stressing out about every test and paper I had due. And afterwards, I thought it was worth all of the stress and pressure as I looked at my GPA, 0.2 points short of a 4.0—but was it really worth it?

Because in the end, who is going to care about your grades? No hiring manager is going to say that your A+ in that random extracurricular class is what convinced them you were right for the job. Nobody is going to pat you on the back for surviving that final for a GE class you didn’t even want to take in the first place. Nobody is going to care about your GPA once you graduate college.

I’ve dedicated my entire life to maintaining my good grades, and I regret doing that. Because instead of dedicating my life to learning and educating myself on matters I’m actually interested in, I’ve dedicated my life to some letters on a piece of paper that don’t even really matter. If schools spent half as much time trying to open and expand their students’ minds as they did trying to trip them up over a trick question on an exam or a difficult essay topic, maybe the US educational system wouldn’t be ranked so unimpressively compared to other countries.

It’s time that we, as a country, do better to help students learn without turning their educations into one giant competition. Getting good grades is always going to be helpful in whatever future endeavors you go on, but is it worth losing countless nights of sleep to get an A on an exam that was designed to test your memory skills rather than what you actually learned? Is it worth the gallons of Red Bull and Monster? Is it worth the loss of sanity? Is it worth constantly feeling like you aren’t good enough?

Is it worth any of that to get a “good grade?”