Finals

Since everyone else seems to be posting about finals I suppose I will go on my own little rant. Finals and the stress that come with the end of the year really annoy me. I feel like every course follows a timeline of assignments and activities that are expected rather than one that makes sense for each individual course and its material. Finals especially fall into this category. It's the last two weeks or so of school and every professor thinks its time to "see what you know". All I'm showing my teachers is what kind of paper or exam I can scrape together through the stress and exhaustion of a closing semester. This isn't meant to be me complaining from a lazy standpoint, I just believe that if finals are an attempt for students to culminate what they have learned, this is a poor representation. The pressure to perform on these evaluations rarely produce an accurate picture of what kind of student someone is or what they have taken away from a course. By the time we get to college especially, we have reached a point where education is no longer required, we are paying to further our knowledge. Why is this not enough incentive to engage in a course? I think interest and personal will should be what motivate us in courses rather than the desire to make a grade and regurgitate "what we know" in 3 hours or less for a large portion of a grade. While there needs to be a way of assessing what students have taken from a course, I believe that equally distributed exams and papers may not be the best way to gauge that.