Every time I have to take an exam. I just really don’t see the point. These are professors of STEM subjects and somehow they think taking a sample of every student’s knowledge for an hour twice in 4 months is somehow accurately representative of their knowledge on the material and thus must be judged by it.

It just doesn’t make sense under any context. If anything, taking ~5-10 minute quizzes at the start of class once or so per week would be that much more representative, much less stressful for the student since their grade would be more spread out, and encourage active studying to keep up with that class.

Instead we have these exams where professors try and search for some vaguely defined limit on the student’s ability to stretch the material. Maybe some of the students didn’t understand what the prof was asking (since, contrary to their own opinions, profs are more often than not vague and leave out a lot of information assuming you would just make the same assumption they made when making the problem). Maybe the student just got dumped the night before. Maybe they’re sick. I don’t know, but it’s just an incredibly stupid system that seems like it’s attempting to treat human beings as if they were machines, expected to spit out data at a given time because the professor filled in the punch cards to feed to them that contain the data. It’s just not how human beings work and ends up wasting everyone’s time.