Every November and every April/May, students everywhere get stressed and want to pull their hair out because the grades they make on their finals make or break the grades they have in their classes. It's too much.

I have never been a good test taker and I probably never will be. It's just the anxiety that surrounds the idea of a 50 question, true/false, matching, fill in the blank test. And for what? To, ultimately, determine my intelligence. Some may say, "no, it's to test your understanding of the material", that may be true but there are other ways to do that by doing more laid back things. Ever think that maybe if we scrapped taking tests and just did crossword puzzles or something instead, students would get better grades?

And usually, it's testing us on subjects that have nothing to do with anything. The only thing I really remember from high school is the quadratic formula song. Mainly because it was a song and not on a test. During finals, I have heard a lot of my peers say that when they study hard and take the test, they forget everything. That shouldn't be the case, though it happens to me too. To me, that means the tests aren't doing the jobs that they need to be doing. Instead, they are wrecking our minds trying to pull things out that weren't really there in the first place. If things don't come naturally, we won't remember it. That's just my two cents on the matter. Finals don't determine my intelligence, I can prove that in other ways.