Finals and/or tests in and of themselves aren't evil, testing someones capabilities and/or memory is part of an educational process. Knowledge often carries a steep price tag. Someone is paying big money for you to get a Physics degree. Someone is also paying for your wife's Chemisty degree. (I will, for the sake of this post, assume it is yourselves)   Testing to see if you can retain and apply that knowledge is not entirely unexpected, now is it?

The money and time spent in the learning is lost if you can't remember shit!

P.S. Best of luck to both of you.

I was VERY tired when I wrote this and have since woken up to read my tirade  .  I do agree about knowledge not coming easy but I looked over her test prep stuff compared to mine and it was insanely ridiculous in comparison for the sheer volume.  I tip my hat to my wife for sticking through it and finishing though. 

But there a major difference between idactic memory which could fail eventually without knowing it is failing and knowledge memory in which you know something exists and understand conceptually how it works and use reference materials so your exact measurements are correct.  Speed over accuracy which is more important?

Indeed. I found that if I read and reread the material and used the formulas in practical problems, my memory held onto the stuff. Howvever, understanding the material was essential to remembering it.

I love test.

I can recite the first 20 something elements of the periodic table....learned by rote ...over 40 years ago....and still remember them.

From their order you can determine atomic weights and 'stuff' [without actually learning those at all].

Probably timely to note my education predated computers....and calculators too [for that matter]... but had 'learned' to do long division in my head...

The memory (recall) versus understanding and using 'data' (info, formulae, metabolic pathways, decay rates, etc., etc., ) seems one  aspect of our culture that can be confusing.  Lawyers, to pass the bar exam, must successfully remember and regurgitate, on command, vast amounts of 'data.'  But in practice, are to always look up the law/code before advising a client - and if caught not doing so - are actually guilty of mal-practice.  Early (20 years ago) Jeopardy TV game shows referred to winners as smart, when, in fact, it was mostly those with very good (photographic?) memories who won. Not so true now.  A recent article about a Chinese scholar intrigued me.  He is suggesting that the forced rote memorization of 3,000+ 'symbols (the word pictographs) of written Chinese could be greatly reduced if a new approach was adopted.  Memorizing the base symbols, and then learning how these base symbols came to be grouped to create the more complex word (pictographs) of modern Chinese would significantly reduce the number of 'meaningless' symbols memorized.  Then the work of learning how they fit together to represent more complex meanings (like more involved words) would begin.

The bad news for those like me who are easily bored: Understanding what the data means, and how it all fits together, is related, etc., is essential, but can't happen unless there is some 'rote' memory work as a base to work from.

That depends if you are being asked to testify to a committee concerning funding whether a project has met the merits of society or not and are quizzed over varying information that is usually not included in a project report.  People tend to still ask for it in person because people like to know those facts even though they are most times not quantifiable.

Speaking as a chemist myself, organic chemistry is unlike anything else I've ever studied in that regard.  You are, literally, memorizing recipes for making countless different things.  What reagents to use, what medium to add them to, what temperature to cook them at... it's like having to memorize every recipe in a cookbook, down to the finest detail.

This is why I went into theoretical/physical chemistry.

I remember the entire technology tree to SMAC, including the prereqs for all items in the game, even though I haven't played the game for years...I am just waiting for the day where that knowledge will be key to the survival of the human race....

Dear lord the tragedy of the commons problem!

I'm not sure if any tragedy of the commons problem would truly lead to the extinction. The deaths of billions of people in the worse case scenario, perhaps, but I'm sure either the rich or the government will make those fallout style vaults for a lucky few to live on.

As for final exams, I wish I had them. All of my teachers scheduled the last "test" or project on the last day of class, despite the fact that the finals system was created to prevent that exact thing from occurring.

Interesting.  The most recent university I attended had a rule (university senate or Administration - I forget) actually prohibiting the 'last day of class' scheme. 

As to planet earth being equivalent to the 'commons,' re: our species survival: yes, it is possible humanity, in some form, would survive the earth being turned into one big cess-pool-midden.  However, remember, part of what we are doing (as a species) is also poisoning the ground water on a massive scale (secret-poison-toxic-chemical-proprietary- 'hydro' fracking) and weakening the lithosphere (which will allow magma up to the surface in greater time frames/areas than has been its pattern in the past, and causing mild earthquakes in places they normally don't occur.  Hello Easter Island, goodbye culture.  Oh, yes, the shelters - for a few lucky souls.  have you played Fallout series?  They are a wild ride.  Check it out if you haven't played them.