Finals suck.You would think somebody who gets paid to write would spend more effort trying to come up with some more fancy, less stark words to describe it. But there’s no better way to encapsulate in so short a space just how painful finals are for some people.It’s one of the most stereotypical examples of high-stress situation. Students are forced to cram an entire semester’s worth of information into one week’s worth of late-night study sessions, and professors are expected to distil the entirety of a course they have labored through consistently and intensively into one big, easily-testable package.The negative effects of finals-week testing are well documented. A week’s worth of virtually uninterrupted studying, combined with the crushing pressure of a single high-stakes test that makes or breaks a grade, can and does wreck immune systems and cause mental health problems. But is it worth it?The argument for finals is that they are a way to test a student’s knowledge of the material covered in the course. This might make sense — if the tests didn’t require hours of preparation. If finals are a benchmark of how much a student learned during a course, should students really have to spend days cramming for them? If they do, doesn’t that indicate that instructors haven’t done their job?The second, more legitimate argument for finals is that they are themselves an instructional tool. By forcing students to “rigorously digest information,” professors claim that these exams reinforce information broadly taught in the course. But let’s be honest with ourselves — no digesting is involved with finals — if such an analogy is to be employed, it’s information vomit. How many students can honestly claim to know as much about an exam a week after the test as they do during the day it’s administered? Cramming for finals is by nature an intense exercise in short-term memory, where students choke down as much information they can stomach, then regurgitate it once — and only once.It’s true some students are actually advocates of final exams. How many times have you heard some dazed classmate behind you say (or have you said yourself) “Well, I’ve got a D in this class, but if I do well on the final, I can pull out a B!”As convenient as it is to redeem a semester’s worth of laziness, this is hardly an ideal teaching environment, and it’s certainly not fair. Students who put forth effort all year to read and practice the material can wreck their grade if, for any number of reasons beyond their control, they do poorly on a single exam. And finals provide students an excuse to slack off during the year merely by putting forth the required effort at the end — which, if such a strategy actually works, is as much an indictment of the class syllabus as it is of the student’s work ethic.Now I’m not an expert on education techniques. I’m not even an education major. But it seems the benefits of high-stakes final exams are questionable, and they certainly don’t seem worth the suffering they inflict in students.If there’s some scientific educational basis for finals, then the practice should remain. But if that’s true, there ought to be a disclaimer on every copy of every final: “Yes, we know that studying for this test caused you no end of stress and worry, but we promise it’s worth it.” I’ve never seen or heard such a disclaimer from a professor, (in fact, it’s more common to hear “I’m only doing this because I have to”) and it seems the policy is more a result of an antiquated tradition than any real educational value.Anyway, Merry Christmas, LSU. I hope you get to spend the break recovering from the stress — or from the drug/alcohol/McDonald’s-fueled catharsis you go on to recover from them.Matthew Albright is a 21-year-old mass communication major from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_malbright.—-Contact Matthew Albright at [email protected]