If nervousness had a face, it would look like the Old Main 1030 and 1050 rooms, packed with hundreds of nervous students taking final exams.

The anxiety radiating from the surrounding students makes you wonder whether you forgot to study the most important chapter. Slowly, you receive the answer sheet and the test. Terrified of being accused of peeking, you glue your eyes to the half-desk in front of you. 

Then comes the time-emotion paradox: because of the discomfort and undying stress, the exam feels endless. But, because of your test anxiety and the need to address every question, it feels like you are running out of time. Even Einstein might agree that the theory of relativity fails here.

But what makes an exam worse, for both good and bad test-takers alike, is not just the pile of stress they create. It is how little they often apply to real life.

If somebody asked me to recall something from last semester, I could tell you I cried over missing an easy point on a calculus exam, but I could not tell you which question I missed. In contrast, I know exactly what my team misread in a group project, and I can remember precisely how we fixed it.

Exams often do little justice to understanding. On top of that, they may even reinforce mistakes. Research published in Journal of Experimental Psychology found that exposure to wrong multiple-choice options can later make those choices seem true. To make matters worse, many final exam are never returned to student, mostly to protect the questions for future exams. That means students often never learn what they missed. And let us be honest: most of us are not heading to office hours unless we are one point away from the grade we wanted.

As an icing to the cake, wrapping up the semester with one comprehensive exam not only leaves you with dark circles, but also with an even darker realization when you remember nothing at your upper-level classes. 

Now think about projects. If you pour your heart into a group project, you often get more than a good grade. You gain an experience worth talking about. You may even add it to your resume or LinkedIn profile. Most importantly, when the interview question comes up, you have a story to tell that checks off the boxes of the Situation, Task, Action and Result (STAR) approach. 

But what tangible benefit comes from an exam? Have you ever seen a LinkedIn post sharing how two days of no sleep and a semester of procrastination led to building great memory retention?

Sure, you may not get the best teammates in a group project, but projects teach a valuable life lesson: adjusting and adapting to the unexpected can take you far. They even teach perfectionists like me, who want every possible point, to accept imperfection and move forward. 

Projects show how life is more than cramming theoretical knowledge. It is about building solutions step by step, having hard conversations within a group and navigating the difficulties together. 

To read Pragati Gautam’s half of the face-off, click here.