That time of the year...

Finals: the time of year when you question your major(s) and minor(s), along with your decision to get an education.

It's that time of the year for colleges to see how far they can push their students to the brink of insanity and test how much information from a semester's worth of classes we can absorb in the short amount of time allotted to the students before each of their end-of-term exams.

Which is ridiculous. Tests are dumb. And while this may seem like a typical American perspective, it's not. Tests are dumb because they measure knowledge and information gained within a certain period of time. They do not test the understanding of each individual student on the subject in question. Tests are made by people, and as we all know, people have flaws. And this is the major flaw of the testing situations that many privileged people get to experience and dread.

Students are tested to pass classes and move on to bigger and more difficult challenges and eventually to the real world. GASP! The real world. Now what's that like? Well, it means having a job, or perhaps trying to get a job while being unemployed; it means paying bills and trying to feed yourself on a daily basis on whatever salary you may earn. In the real world, professionals are expected to learn on the go, you cannot possibly know everything and so when you get to a point where you don't know what to do, you ask for help, you look something up in a manual, a textbook, you work on it.

And how does this relate to how dumb tests are? Tests are dumb because you can't copy, or as I like to say, use your resources. Tests don't measure how good we are at working with others and our resources to gain an understanding. Pause. Understanding, not knowledge. I can know something, but do I understand it just because I know it? No. Understanding happens after gaining knowledge, not before, but it's a process that can take a while to complete, and I would argue that you don't really complete it, but that's another topic for another day.

Understandably, it would be rather difficult to test this. Written, yes. Oral, no. You can talk about it, conversations are great indicators on one's knowledge and understanding of a subject. It'll take time and total overhaul of the testing situation, but is it worth it? Perhaps, we won't know until we do it.