I don't think you'll ever meet someone who will say that they love finals week. I know that I certainly don't. It's not that I mind putting in work and taking tests - that's not my favorite thing to do, but it's a part of life, and definitely not the problem that finals week always presents me with. The problem that I find instead is that I always get immensely frustrated with the fact that I don't feel like finals represent the best work that I am capable of doing, or even show work consistent with what I have done up until that point in the semester.
I feel like what I'm really being tested on is how good I am at staying up all night and functioning on barely any sleep, cramming as much information into my brain as humanly possible. It's not that I left it until the night before, although I will admit that sometimes that does happen - it's the fact that on one day this finals week I had three exams in a row, and trying to refresh and review for all three at once is fairly time-consuming, especially when all three have the same time constraint.
All anyone really cares about during finals week is shoving as many facts and figures, examples and dates, quotes and definitions into their head as possible for just as long as it takes to take the exam, and then it really doesn't matter to them anymore, and they can just let the information go. It doesn't feel like an accurate representation of a person's abilities. And in classes where the final is worth almost almost half or more of your grade, all the work that you've done up until that point is essentially useless if you trip up on your final. The motivation to really learn, process the information, take the time to develop it and really understand it is gone, and it is replaced with an immediate need to just take in the surface information and hope for the best.
This creates a distinct lack in long-lasting and significantly processed information that functions to effectively work in a student's brain and in their life. I walked out of a final earlier today and realized that the exact moment after I handed the exam in to my professor, half of the things that I had crammed into my brain the night before were gone. I had just memorized the quick information without actually analyzing or understanding it, and because of that, nothing that I learned (or didn't learn) really stuck.
Finals week is kind of awful for many, many reasons, and this is just one of them. It can get frustrating, but remember what you're in this for, and what you want to get out of it, and then it may just be worth it. To all those completing their first finals week: good luck, and to all those completing their last: congratulations! May we all get through this with A's, success, and relatively few tears.
