My Tirade Against Finals

Well, so I've decided to be less clever with my blogs so that there will be some blogs. From now on, only mundane, boring ramblings from a cranky guy.

Do I have to rant about finals? Let me rant about finals.


We know that we forget the specifics of what we learn immediately. Such is the nature of memory. Yet this does not invalidate education; the details are lost, but the broad concepts stay. The point of education, then, is to train us to be able to pick up any concept easily at any point, when we need it. Pity be they engaged in majors like biology, where there are no broad concepts and only details.

Too many people forget this. We're not in school to learn; we're in school to learn how to learn, to develop the discipline to learn. That we have to choose a major is merely a dose of reality, the necessity of a job after we graduate, and the impatience of employers to train people from the ground up.

Unfortunately, of the people who lose sight of this, professors are among the most prominent. Those requiring students to remember every detail for the sake of remembrance forget the purpose of education and must be subjected to re-enacting a scene from Pulp Fiction. We all know which scene I'm talking about.

The mythical "final" then is a pointless, clinical requirement for you to recall one last time details that you've acquired from the semester, for no specific need whatsoever. It flies against the very idea of education altogether. It is a selfish, narcissistic act on the test-giver's part, and a useless, futile struggle against human memory on the student's part.

Should you, then, refuse to take your finals on these grounds? Only if you're a dumbass.