Finals plague life after college

I am writing in response to Matt Csanyi\'s Dec. 4 IDS column, \"Your Finals Are Worthless.\" His lead-in paragraph leads me to believe that he is on drugs and alcohol most of the time and that when he is sober and bored, he goes to class. That\'s unfortunate, but its good he does not attend classes on fumes or smoke or other purple haze. He is a serious student.\nBut I am not writing him about his condition. I am writing that I agree to the point that finals can make or break a student\'s grade accumulation. While in graduate school (three IU master\'s degrees), I felt that finals were unfair because they all were scheduled back to back within a few days of each other. Yes, you might be able to concentrate on one or maybe two but not four within the same day or a few days apart. \nSay you were doing swell all semester but along come finals and you just finished with the required papers. You might have had an \"A\" going in a class but your energies are now siphoned off trying to bring four or five classes together in your mind at once. It\'s enough to break you mentally and contemplate suicide since so much rides on grades, like your scholarship or whether you will be able to call Bloomington your home after finals. It\'s even tougher for undergraduates since the classes are usually not related to each other like in graduate school.\nYou are correct about recall after the testing. Chances are, you try to forget! Finals are a way for the system to separate the wheat from the chaff. The system wants the milk to separate, so the cream will rise to the top and the whey will be on the bottom. Tests are synonymous with education. But outside of education, there are tests everywhere you turn in society. \nFinals also have another dark side, rarely discussed, that might affect you for the rest of your life. College graduates that I talk to all confess having a recurring dream about a test for which they were unprepared. I am 53 years old and still have this nightmare where I discover that I was registered for a class and did not know it but found out the last week that I was enrolled and had an \"F\" going and the final was my last chance.\nThe dream leaves you with this terrible sinking feeling. I want to leave you saying to do your best, that you are not alone during finals week and the mere thought of finals still haunts me after all these years.\nAll the best in the face of the worse. You and finals will pass.