Finally, after waiting since … well, since midterms, when the semester stress kicked in and stayed in, summer is here. I said goodbye to my friends, packed my stuff and schlepped it back home. It’s currently all over my floor, waiting to be unpacked.

It might take me a while — I haven’t caught up on sleep yet, for one thing. A couple of days ago, I slept for 11 hours and was still tired when I woke up.

On nights when I only got seven or eight hours, I could barely pull myself out of bed.

I obviously haven’t recovered from barely sleeping during finals week.

I’m not alone in hating finals.

In fact, as we try to recover from hand cramps and caffeine addictions in that period between leaving campus and starting jobs (and waiting for those final grades), I’d put money on every single student cursing professors for putting us through exam hell.

And really, what is the point of finals?

I could trot out the old “we don’t want to take them and they don’t want to grade them” line, but I do understand the need to give us a big grade as the culmination of our semester of learning.

I just think there are better ways to do it than exams.

Final projects usually aren’t fun (especially when you have to work in a group), but they can be a much better indication of what we learned over the semester.

Exams aren’t about how much we learned; they’re about how much we can cram into our heads in the 48 hours before a test.

Final projects, on the other hand, force us to apply our knowledge and to practice what we learned. Class on magazines? Students should have to create their own, from concept to articles. Class on Gothic architecture? Students should have to design their own Gothic structure to fit the structural and decorative elements of the place and time they choose.

But me scribbling down on a blue book during a two-hour exam that the Spartan general Lysander defeated the Athenian general Conon at Aegospotami in 405 B.C. and effectively ended the Peloponnesian War doesn’t prove I learned that from a lecture. It just proves I memorized a list of names and dates.

I’m not advocating that professors should just end a semester with a final lecture or even do away with tests completely.

But if something is going to be worth 40 percent of our grade (or more), then it should involve an application of our knowledge rather than a test of who’s good at memorization and who isn’t.

Not only that, but by the time we reach exam week, we’re burnt out. We’ve already turned in papers in almost every class and group projects in the rest. We’re exhausted from the intense workload, and the nice weather is calling our names. And we still have another week to go, filled with tests — because we have to study for a huge test in every class, not just one.

It’s pretty unlikely that the last couple of exams get the time and attention they require.

So let’s just do away with final exams altogether.

Give a last test, which requires a third of the work, and have a paper or a project or a debate instead — something that allows us to apply all that information we painstakingly learned (or memorized) during the semester.

Practice makes perfect, but cramming is just memorizing information we’ll forget by the time grades come out.