End suffering, put finals to their final rest

When daily planners are filled with assignments, books covered with coffee stains and students burnt out from studying, final exams pay a visit to seal the semester.

There should not be final exams at all. This does not mean that professors should not give final projects, papers or presentations— it simply means that there is no need for finals.

There are different types of final exams: essay questions, matching tests, true or false and multiple-choice questions. And, students need to memorize the material in most cases to get a good grade.

Some teachers give open book, take-home exams, online tests and quizzes, which are great! But those in class multiple-choice exams are a waste of time—not the two-hour period taking the test, but the time spent memorizing for that test.

Final exams don't measure the level of comprehension students attain by taking the course like a project or a paper would.

The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the word school is "final exams."With that thought come feelings of frustration.

Why am I so frustrated and annoyed by finals?

Memorization! To be honest, I really don't remember most of the things I learned for a final exam, simply because I memorized it to take that test. It goes in one ear, stays until the test is taken, and is quickly out the other.

"His [teacher] task is to fill the students with the contents of his narration," confirmed Paulo Freire, an educator and a theorist of critical pedagogy. "Contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance."

All that stress has no reward or so little that most of the information memorized is lost. Then what's the point of taking the course?

I trust doctors, counselors, professors who have learned through experience and have done projects and know the understanding of critical thinking, rather than those who have just memorized a list of words and their definitions.

In most classes, students are being graded and evaluated throughout the semester and then are expected to take a final exam. Don't the instructors trust their own grading?

Some professors decide to give an exam, others a project and a paper, and some give comprehensive exams. What are they basing their decisions on? Why have they used this teaching strategy?

Final exams are just another exam to test the students' learning, yet in some classes they comprise a major part of the grade.

I think that it's not fair to play with a student's grade based on one final exam and throw all the semester's hours of hard work away.

Some teachers just give final exams simply because the grading process is easier and faster, they just have to put the scantrons through a machine, submit the grades and get a fast start on their vacation.

But on the students' part, thousands of words to read, hundreds of concepts to memorize, and back to back vigorous and painful examinations could make anyone feel like their head is going to explode.

I agree that I'm a student, and this is my job, but I would like to get something out of it.

The finals all show up all at the same time, and students don't have enough space for hospitality.

It's about the student's enhanced learning and not about feeding them information that they can't digest.